


and not to yield.

by Vernal



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Abuse, Earthborn (Mass Effect), F/M, PTSD, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-20
Updated: 2016-05-21
Packaged: 2018-05-27 23:03:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 5
Words: 37,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6303649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vernal/pseuds/Vernal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She is seven years old, with bruisedark eyes. But she gets older.</p><p>A retelling of the Mass Effect story, from childhood to the end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Reds

**Author's Note:**

> Rated Explicit. If you are sensitive to rape or graphic depictions of violence, please take care; both are present ahead.

 

                                                                              _I mete and dole_  
_Unequal laws unto a savage race,_  
_That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me..._

                                                                                       — Tennyson,  _Ulysses_

 

"Hey Shepard," the older boy said. "Look."

She looked. The alley was dark, but there was movement. Two children. Small shadows against deeper ones.

"When you see anyone," the older boy said, "you clap, like this."

He clapped three times, twice quickly and then once more, after a pause. The echoes rang off the buildings and died in the city noise.

"That's it?" she said.

"That's it. And then we take care of it."

Below them there was a rattling of gunfire. She looked down in time to see two bodies falling, highlighted in the muzzleflash. A glimpse of a red cloth on the arms of the gunmen.

"You get more food the more you spot," the older boy said. "If you don't spot any we'll give you enough to keep you alive but you'll still be hungry. If no one comes, that's just tough luck. You got it?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. Have fun."

#

She lay a long time on the edge of the rooftop dreaming of food. The orphanagewhere she had been for her early years had been understaffed and overcrowded but there had always been something to eat, though never quite enough. Soups with thin broth, the meat hoarded by firstcomers. Noodles. Lukewarm beans.

Even in the dark of the alley she could make out the contours of a dumpster and a pile of thickwalled trash bags. A smashed security camera hung from a frayed wire below the eaves. There were rats in the shadows, and other things, animals she did not yet know the names of. She watched them all the same.

A door opened somewhere distant. Clang of metal on stone, raised voices and someone calling for hush. "Through here," someone said, and she heard it.

The shadow of a head came around the corner. She could barely see over the edge as it was but she pulled back even further, hoping they couldn't see her.

"You're sure?" someone else said.

"Yeah. This way."

A boy stepped out from around the corner and so did another. After them came five more. They carried among them all manner of improvised weaponry: boards and chunks of masonry ripped from the insides of buildings, old tools once used for God knew what purposes, various bars and lengths of metal which they wielded like swords. And the one foremost among them carried slung across his chest a real rifle, wood and steel, nearly half as tall as he was himself.

She clapped.

The boy with the rifle swung the barrel up and forward and sighted clumsily along it. "You see anything?" he said.

"No," someone answered.

He let the rifle down so that it was again across his chest and fetched up a pair of binoculars from his side. All too late and all in vain. There was first a single gunshot and then several, and soon the alleyway was filled with all manner of screams such that even the gunshots were drowned in it. The boy had started firing the rifle and there were sparks flying off the dumpster and the windowframes about the alleyway, and smoke flooded in a cloud from where a trashbag had taken a shot and begun to smolder. There were screams in voices reedy thin with youth and there was smoke so thick she could barely see through it. A lone boy ran for the end of the alley dragging a trail of clear air behind him and then was shot through the head and killed outright. After that the gunfire stopped and there was a long and ringing silence as the gunmen picked their way among the dead.

"Good call," a girl shouted up to her.

She shifted where she lay. "Thanks," she called back.

"You're supposed to clap for as many people as there are."

"Okay."

"You catch any strays up there?"

"Strays?"

"Stray bullets."

"No."

"Good."

"Do you want me to stay up here?"

"You got a few more hours. You didn't piss yourself, did you?"

"No."

"Good. Stay up there. We'll come get you when you're done."

#

She is seven years old, with bruisedark eyes and cheekbones so long and sharp they show like scars in the right light. Over them the skin is stretched and worn with hunger, and there are deep hollows where shadows gather even in sunlight. Bones, they call her. She responds to it like a given name.

The circumstances of her birth are a mystery even to her. The will of God delivered you to us, a nun had said to her once, in the orphanage. But she has no knowledge of father or mother or indeed of any kin, and in the orphanage she was known well for a certain character of silence. Even dead quiet she could turn the eyes of adults until they let her be, and it was in such a way that she found her way to the street.

#

The Sprawl stretches from Washington, D.C to somewhere north of Boston and encompasses in its scope both New York and Philadelphia. Its lowest streets gridlocked or abandoned, those that can afford them use skycars. Landing platforms sprout like mushrooms from skyscrapers and arcologies and the cars themselves are an omnipresent swarm overhead.

The Reds are upstarts in an old neighborhood. Tenth Street runs from what is now ocean to some distant and theoretical point but they have staked all of it as theirs and others do not take this lightly. None among them have any home or cause to speak of, and so they keep watch over their streets and defend them and theirs with a sharp and bloody fury.

#

"Bones," someone said, and she woke. Around her there was darkness and a heavy quiet.

"What?"

"It's me."

"What is it?"

"Some of the Skulls are coming. We don't have much ammo, so they're getting everyone up to fight."

He handed her a hammer. It was heavy and something in it was rattling but she took it and sat up. Above her Finch's face was barely a shadow in the morning dark. "How many are there?" she said.

"We don't know. They think they killed the scouts on the street, no one's come to warn us of anything. The older boys are just telling everyone to get up and get a weapon."

He took a small knife out of his pocket and pried the blade free. It was an old and rusty thing with a stagbone handle and some time ago someone had used it and not cleaned it after. "They gave it to me just now," he said. "I didn't think they were going to give me a knife."

"You could give it to me."

"Do you think they'll ask for it back?"

"No."

"Quiet," someone said.

They crouched waiting in the alley and listened to the noise of the early morning. It was summer, and though she knew it would be hell soon the heat was not yet bad.There were pigeons in the eaves and on windowsills, and they murmured quietly in the rising light as if discussing the day to come.

Someone clapped five times overhead and then there was a gunshot. Finch let out a thin breath through his teeth. "They got him too," he said.

"Yeah."

"At least five, though."

"Where do you think they'll come from?"

"Ninth. Through the other alley, the wide one. If they have a lot of people it'll be easier for them to get in."

"Quiet!" someone else said, and they were quiet.

She could hear a thunder of footsteps reflecting through the alleyways. There was a curse from somewhere, and then another voice spoke up, older. "South alley," it said. "From Ninth Street. Wait behind the corner."

They moved. A hand came down on her shoulder. "Bones," the older boy said. "Watch the east alley."

"Okay."

"If you see someone, don't clap, just yell. Loud as you can."

There was another gunshot, and she could feel his head turn above her. "Go," he said.

She went to the alley corner. In the east, through a thin strip between buildings, she could see light reflecting off the windows. Pale blue replacing the dark. When she looked back down to the street she could see shadows, but no movement. Then someone grabbed her roughly by the hair, and as she turned her head they drew a razor down her cheek and opened up the skin to the bone.

She bucked backward in pain and swung up hard with the hammer. The shock ran into her arm and there was a muted noise of small bones breaking. In front of her she saw two shadows move.

"OVER HERE!" she called out. "MORE OF THEM!"

The boy was bent down and was breathing in a heavy nasal way such that she could hear the blood in the back of his throat. Small dull noises of pain through shattered teeth. She would have swung at him again but her face was hot and wet and her mouth would not move when she tried to speak. As he rose she could barely focus through the pain. "Over here," she called again, weaker. The words were slurred. Split muscles in her cheeks, blood down her neck.

The boy was rising and then Finch was there, and he stabbed the boy in the stomach with the pocket knife. She went to her knees. The boy had gone to the ground himself and still Finch was driving the knife into his gut, poking tiny holes that barely bled. She pitched the hammer forward. Finch took it with barely a glance and raised it up and brought it down on the boy's head. The whole shape of the boy's skull deformed under the blow and there was blood halfway to crimson but still he was not dead.

Finch took up the knife again and crammed it into the boy's eyesocket. Beyond him others of the Reds had come and someone was firing into the alley. By some last instinct the boy's hand fluttered up to cover his newest wound. Finch struck a last blow with the nailpull of the hammer and then stood up. Fear on his face and also a spray of blood. The boy was still not dead.

#

The Reds lost ten. Three killed outright and seven more to bad wounds. There were few bandages among them, and those there were went to the older boys first. But they saved a bandage for her and it was the first soft thing she had felt in months, cloudy white and sticky with medigel. Even in pain she held it like a reverant.

"You have to put it on quick or it'll leave a scar," one of the older boys said. He took it from her hands and pressed it on hard and there was a flare of pain down all the way through her jaw. The others around her watched in silence.

"You warned us," the older boy said, still holding the bandage. There was a kind of tenderness in his hands. "We owe you for that." And Finch.

"She called it," Finch said. "I just killed him."

A chorus of low laughter rippled through the group. The older boy said something and a brace of knives was handed forward. Old blades in dark metal with leather grips cracked with age. No sheathes to speak of. Finch took his with a kind of hesitant hopefulness and she took hers without expression. A curious blank analysis behind her eyes. She looked up at the older boy without blinking, and before long he turned away.

#

After the fight she shaves her hair. It falls as if it has been waiting to fall. Finch and others comment, and some laugh, but she runs her fingers over the knifehandle-- _her_ knife, she thinks--and they are quiet.

She grows. From seven to nine she stays lookout, and her eyes catch the most. A runner in an alley two girls aiming a rifle from a window. The nervousness of a spy inside their ranks. They give her praise, always praise, but she goes back to the eaves, to the rooftops, back to her sliver of sky.

#

Somewhere above and far away, the Systems Alliance Parliament is formed. Names that will one day live in history books are given to the children who will bear them. It is the beginning of a new age and humanity rises to the task with zeal and newfound unity, and even those that resist this upstart species give grudging respect.

#

Still she grows. As she turns ten the Reds plant themselves in the ruins of an old library, stringing up hammocks from the rafters. At eleven she comes along on a soup kitchen raid and kills a cook going for a knife, opening his throat until his head lolls back between his shoulderblades.

They burn old books to heat the cans and open far more than they need. Nearly all among them full to the point of sickness. She takes only one can for herself and retreats to the furthest corner, watching in silence the flames on the library floor.

#

"Can you read?" Finch called up to her.

She was perched on the end of a high ladder with a book open in her hands. She looked down at him.

"No."

"What's the book?"

"I don't know."

She stepped lightly down the ladder and handed up the book with little ceremony.

"It says Ten-ny-son," Finch said.

The word TENNYSON was debossed in flaking gold on the green cover. He opened it. The year 1926 was printed in thin and faded type on the first page. Paperflakes fell as he paged further through.

"This isn't a story," he said. "I don't know what it is."

He turned through further. On the last pages there was a portrait etching covered in a fine translucent paper with TENNYSON written again beneath.

"Is that who wrote it?" she said.

"I think so."

She took the book back into her hands and laid it open flat in her palms. Pages fluttering like pigeonwings. More paperflakes came into the air and the spine made soft noises of strain from the sudden wear. All of a sudden a page lay open in front of her. 116.

"The older boys would know what this is," she said.

"They'll just toss it in the fire."

But she went anyway to where there were still fires on the old floor. Piles of ash were everywhere and everywhere too the remnants of bookcovers that had resisted the flames. Around one fire and one fire only the older boys were sitting and talking. There were cans open before them and rifles and pistols close to hand.

"What does this say?" she asked them, and held the book up.

They looked at her. There was an amused disbelief in their eyes at the insolence of one so young, but they knew her for something different than the others and it was this perhaps that persuaded them. One of the boys took the book with a curious gentleness.

"Tennyson," he said. "Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It's a book of poems."

"What does that mean?"

"Poems are like... like a different kind of story."

"That's not right, another older boy said. It's about the feeling. They're supposed to make you feel something."

"Right," the first one said. "It's not a story. It's a feeling."

"A feeling," she repeated.

The older boy let the book fall open and again it came to page 116. "The Charge of the Light Brigade," he said.

He read the first lines in a voice so low and so quiet she could not even make out a word and then he cleared his throat and read it louder. He read the whole thing and as he read something seemed to come into him that she had not seen before, a new steadiness and strength. In truth he was the only one among the Reds with any education. He was the oldest of them by far and if any among them could be called the leader it was he. He read, and the words echoed in the space such that others turned to listen. "Honour the Light Brigade," he read. "Noble six hundred."

#

She is twelve and then thirteen. There is a new sharpness in her features, an adolescent thinness in her coltish limbs but still no awkwardness or stumble in her step. She does not yet know the word grace but it is in her movements, and it is noticed. Those girls younger than she envy and fear her, and all watch her where she goes.

Her voice deepens to something that can hold command. She grows still taller.

#

"Turn around," the older boy said.

They were alone in a sideroom of the library. Around them were toppled shelves and high windows and a bare mattress where the older boy was lying.

"She turned," her back to him.

"Have you ever been with Finch?" he asked.

"No."

"Anyone?"

"No."

"Take off your shirt."

She took it off. There was bare scarred flesh underneath and nothing else. The older boy smiled.

"Turn around."

She turned. No loss of hardness in her eyes nor any sense of modesty. She had pale skin and small high breasts and four short bonewhite scars over her ribs. Another single scar ran shallow from above her right hip to below the hem of her pants. The boy cocked his head.

"Where did you get that?"

"A knife."

"Whose?"

"Another girl."

He nodded. "Take off your pants."

She took them off. There was nothing underneath. The scar went wide across her outer thigh and sawed back inward. A precise series of smaller notches marked her upper left leg.

"Hmm," the older boy said, and rose to his feet.

#

She will not know for some many years yet the full gravity of that which she has borne. But there is a deep unsettledness in her that she cannot tame and which she will carry some small piece of forever.

#

"I don't want you to see Finch any more," the older boy said, some days later.

"Why?"

"Because."

"Okay."

"I want to give you something."

He stretched naked on the mattress and she watched him. She was naked herself but for the blanket that covered her.

"Have you ever shot a gun before?" he said.

"No."

"Do you know how?"

"I've watched others do it."

He reached under the mattress and pulled out a pistol. There were rust spots on the deepblue finish of the frame but it was still one of the cleanest she had seen.

"This is a Colt," he said. It fires with gunpowder.

He pulled out the magazine and racked the slide with the pistol cocked sideways, and the ejected round flew in an arc that ended in the center of his palm. He held it out and she took it. Brass and lead and powder. A small and heavy thing.

"This can hold eight of those," he said. He locked back the slide and handed it to her.

She took it in her hands and slipped the single bullet into the chamber and racked the slide and raised the pistol and blew a neat and simple hole through the left orbit of the older boy's skull. There was a complete silence in her ears from the muzzleblast. Bloodspatter covered the mattress and the far wall and across her chest where the blanket had slipped.

She took the magazine and inserted it and raked the slide back with the edge of her hand. Then she put on her clothes and exited out the door.


	2. Streets

She takes the Tennyson book and is gone.

There are other gangs in the lower streets of the long city, but she skirts them and and keeps to shadows and rooftops. There is food in the excesses of shops, shelter among the pipes under the streets. Warmth there too, from the steam.

What now, she wonders, when she has time to wonder. She has a gun and a knife and a book, and this last she pages through obsessively though its many words are opaque to her.

She traces patternless wanderings across the edge of the newer city and takes note of the old. There is water up past the windows, the pilings long crumbled. Towers leaning starkly to the side or fallen outright into the new encroaching sea. It is a disaster far before her time and yet she has still a sense of that which has been lost. Some older glory writ in concrete and steel standing for years before returning once more unto the earth.

#

"Hi down there," a voice said.

She looked up through the maze of grating above her patch of floor. A grimy face stared down, grinning.

"Hi," she said back.

"Do you live here?"

"No."

"Why are you down here then?"

She didn't answer. The girl cocked her head to the side.

"Can I come down?"

"Why?"

"I don't see a lot of girls out here. Are you in a gang?"

"I used to be in one."

"Which one?"

"Tenth Street Reds."

"Oh."

"Do you know them?"

"I've seen them sometimes. They wear red bands on their arms, right?"

"Yeah."

"So can I come down?"

She ran her finger along the triggerguard of the Colt where it lay in the shadows. "Okay," she said. "You can come down."

#

The girl's name was Sam. There was an odd twist to her nose and a crescent of bruising about her left eye and she had no belongings to speak of save the clothes on her back. She climbed with some difficulty through the maze of steam and water pipes and after some false moves and no small amount of cursing she landed heavily on the concrete underway and grinned.

"What's your name?" she said.

"Cara."

"How did you even get down here?"

Cara raised the Colt out of the shadows and leveled it. "What do you want," she said.

"I didn't come to steal anything."

"How did you find me?"

"I just looked down."

"Tell the truth."

"I am telling the truth."

Cara had thumbed back the hammer on the Colt but there was no bullet in the chamber and she knew it. Her finger still rested lightly on the trigger and the gun was now in the light.

"I didn't come to steal anything," Sam said. Her head was tilted sideways and her hands were up as if she could ward off the bullet. "I just wanted to talk."

"Do you have anything in your pockets?"

"No."

Why are you out here?

"My mother was in a gang. She had me, and she was raising me. But she died."

"How?"

"I don't know. They wouldn't tell me."

"What gang?"

"Curbside."

"Why did you leave?"

She didn't answer. Cara lowered the Colt.

"Why did you leave," she asked again.

"I don't want to say."

"Someone hurt you," Cara said. Badly.

Sam didn't answer.

Cara thumbed the hammer down on the Colt and safetied it and put it aside. Then she took up the Tennyson book and pitched it forward into the light. Sam looked at it but made no move to take it.

"What is that?" she said.

"Can you read?"

"Yeah. My mom taught me."

"Do you know about poetry?"

"A little bit. My mom went to school, but I didn't."

"I want to know what that book says."

"Why?"

"I just do."

Sam took the book up in her hands and weighed it as if considering what it were worth.

"What will you give me?"

"Apart from not shooting you?"

"Apart from that."

Cara considered this and then took her knife and pitched it forward after the book. "How about that," she said.

Sam picked it up and turned it carefully over in her hands. A wariness in her eyes. "Yeah," she said. "That works."

#

She read until the light failed.

There were many poems and many unfamiliar meanings but Sam read and Cara listened and there among the creaking roar of the steampipes it was a strange kind of beauty that was present. "Full merrily;" she read, "yet all things must die. The stream will cease to flow; the wind will cease to blow; the clouds will cease to fleet; the heart will cease to beat; for all things must die. All things must die. Ye will never see thro' eternity, all things were born. Ye will come never more, for all things must die."

She closed the book and set it down on the floor.

"Why did you stop?" Cara said.

"I can't read any more."

"Keep going," she said. There was a hunger in her voice unfamiliar even to her.

"I don't want to think about death right now."

"Why not?"

"My mom."

"You said that she died."

"She went somewhere with one of the men," she said. "Then a couple hours later they told me she was dead. Two days ago."

Cara pulled the Colt into her lap and turned it idly over in her hands. "You read it yourself," she said. "Everyone dies."

#

That night she lay in a feverdream from which she could not wake. Those few she had killed whispering to her. But their voices came from their wounds and not their mouths and she could not wake as the older boy whispered obscenities from his ruined eye. I'm going to fuck you til you scream, he said. Blood drooling like spittle from the ragged hole. She tried to move but there were no muscles in her arms and the boy leaned down over her until the eye was inches from her face. A second mouth with teeth of splintered bone. Turn around, it said. Turn around.

#

She woke silently. There was the beginning of a scream locked in the back of her throat but she held it and held it and when she let it out there was no sound at all.

Sam's head was butting against her arm from where she had curled up to sleep and Cara moved away from it and turned over onto her side. The echoes of the dream still resonant in her mind. There was perhaps some meaning to it but she did not put stock in such things nor could she now remember the specifics.

"You were really tense," Sam said. Cara turned over. A sudden and uncomfortable closeness between them.

"I was dreaming," she said.

"What was it?"

Cara looked at her and Sam turned away and settled back on her arms. "Sorry," she said. "I won't ask any more."

#

They slept and woke again to daylight. No new dreams in the intervening hours. Hunger in both their bellies but no easy way yet to sate it and so they put it aside and instead climbed up and through the pipes and out again onto the street.

The heat was rising in the city. Down in the lowest levels it seemed almost to be trapped between the buildings and those spaces where the sun shone openly were avoided by all. There were few others out and those there were were not of a kind sort and looked openly on the two with a mix of longing and disdain. A myriad of things stirring beneath their expressions. Under her shirt Cara fingered the checkered grip of the Colt and watched the edges of the alleyways.

"I'm hungry," Sam said.

"We could steal something."

"Where?"

"There's a soup kitchen up on 18th I haven't tried yet. I looked at it a week ago, they didn't have any guards or police."

"Won't they just give you food?"

"They never give you enough. When I was in the Reds, we stole everything they had, it lasted a long time."

"And you just walked in and took it?"

"Sometimes. Other times we had to take hostages."

"Did you kill people?"

"Yeah."

A drunk leered at them from his place on the walkway and they sidestepped him neatly and went on.

"How many people did you take?" Sam said.

"Five, six. Sometimes just two, a lookout and someone who went in. I was a lookout a lot."

"Were you good at it?"

"Yeah."

"Were you ever the thief?"

"No. But I could learn."

#

Before the day's end they had stolen more food than they could easily eat and with the knife they prized open the lids and slurped eagerly the fruits of their labor from the jagged metal hole. They gulped down whole cans at a time until Sam lay groaning from the pressure in her gut.

"I think I had too much," she said. "I still can't believe no one saw us."

"People don't see anything," Cara said.

Sam shut her mouth and looked off to where the pipes vanished in a cloud of steam. Her hand was on the knife and she looked down very carefully to where Cara was lying with her eyes closed.

"But I see that," she said, and Sam grinned.

#

They found Tyler on another of their expeditions, already trading blows with a cook. He was a thin dark-skinned boy of perhaps thirteen years at the most and yet his fists fell like hammerblows and the cook though older and larger shook like a tree in a windstorm when one landed. Cara pulled the Colt and leveled it and when the cook turned to look Tyler floored him with a last wideswinging punch to the temple.

"Nice," Sam said.

Tyler was breathing heavily and there was a clipped scar across his forehead that was bleeding freely. Cara held the gun on him without blinking.

"Did you come here for food?"

He nodded.

"Then get out."

"Hey," Sam said. "We can't carry all of it."

Tyler's hands had gone to fists again and a thin line of blood cut a track down across his cheek and down his neck until it met his shirt. Cara watched him.

"I don't want him trying anything," she said.

"He can just stay back until we take what we need."

"I don't trust him."

"You don't have to trust him."

"Hey," he said. "What gang y'all with?"

"We're not," Cara said.

He nodded. "I ain't either."

"You could come with us," Sam said.

Cara looked at her sharply. "What?"

"He could. We could use someone else to help us."

"Like hell."

"I can help," Tyler said. "I was in a gang, but I ain't no more. Just dont shoot me."

"Why should we bring you with us," Cara said. The Colt's frontsight lay aligned with Tyler's right eye and she did not blink.

"I can fight."

"So can we."

"I done a lot of fighting. I killed people back when I was in my gang, used to was they'd set me on people they didn't like and I'd kill them. I used my hands. I can look out for y'all."

"We don't need looking out for."

"Hey," Sam said. "Come on. Let him go."

"What happened to your gang," Cara asked.

"I got tired of it. I didn't like all the killing so I quit. They didn't want me to go but I run for the other end of the city fore they catch me and now I can't find food worth a damn."

"You didn't like the killing?"

"No," he said, and there was nothing in his eyes or his face that gave it away but Cara could see that it was true. Something there writ against the walls of his skull that she could read as she imagined books were read.

"And you wouldn't kill us."

"No."

She lowered the Colt and safetied it and tucked it into her waistband. "Come on then," she said. "Get as much as you can carry."

#

They ate together among the steampipes and Sam and Tyler talked of their pasts in which they shared more than a few commonalities. Tyler was and had been a bruiser of a child and though he did not look it it was all the more to his advantage. Sent out to kill the enemies of the gang he had more than once been passed over by a lookout as one not worth alarm only to come out swinging and wring the neck of the one he had been sent for. There was no subtlety to him but Cara watched him as he ate and as he spoke and gradually he seemed to her to fit. Into who he was, into what they were.

Sam talked more openly of what she had been and it was not half the happy life Cara had thought but still she thought it was better than her own. A mother who had shielded her from the worst but who could not protect her from the inevitable, that she was a woman in a gang and that she would be expected to do as a woman did. And this she had done, and she told of it in a dispassionate tone so at odds with her speaking voice that Cara nearly covered her ears.

Tyler asked in turn what her own past had been like and she looked up to meet both his eyes and Sam's and almost at the same time they cast their gazes back down. "You don't get to ask about me," she said, and went back to her food.

#

They found a rhythm as the days went on. Summer turned to fall and fall to winter and in the cold they scrounged warmth as well as food and hoarded all they could where they could keep it. On a cold day in the fall a pipe burst and they relocated to a burnt-out shell of a former secondstory restaurant and among the wreckage they cleared enough to make a place to sleep. Blankets they had stolen but also an old oven still improbably connected to power that they turned up each night until the metal elements glowed a blazing orange.

They kept among each other an uneasy peace. Cara carried always the Colt and slept in a corner furthest from anyone. Even in deep dreams she could hear sounds and when the wind rose she woke sure as anything and one night when she heard Tyler wake she had the gun out and trained on him before she was fully woken and caught the falling hammer with her thumb. Sam kept her knife in a sheath she had made of some old scraps of cloth and leather and Tyler carried nothing but he did not need it.

And there were more who joined them. Rejects or outcasts or converts from other gangs. Hunger is a great joiner of destinies and this among other things gathered others to them. There was Sarah who at eleven years had spent eight in a gang and whose left arm was shorn off above the elbow but who cursed in good humor with the rest of them and was a scout three quarters what Cara was. There was Jacob who had lived most days alone on the streets but for a brief stint with the Skulls until they were routed by the Reds and who spoke rarely but loudly and whose strength could move whole beams from their path in explorations.

Between them they had in their heads the whole layout of what had once been a business district. The lower floors now abandoned or claimed by other homeless, they prowled through in search of new lodgings or tools they might use. And there were many things they found. Books which Cara hoarded like goldbricks in her corner and which she read through as best she could from Sam's limited education. Bullets stored in drawers and knives lying rusted where they had fallen and tools and broken electronics aplenty which they collected but made no use of, relics of older ages. And a real rifle in a dumpster, a heavy thing of half-rotted wood and stamped steel which Cara claimed immediately and dryfired until she broke it. In disassembling it Jacob shuffled over to her and sat.

"I know how to do that."

"How?"

"They gave me rifles sometimes when they wanted me to kill people. They wanted me to know how to make them work well, so they taught me. I know this one."

He reached out for it and she held it away. "I still don't trust you," she said.

"I can't shoot you if it doesn't have any bullets in it."

She held it a moment longer and then handed it over but even then she did not stop watching alternately his hands and then his eyes. He took apart the gun with a smooth deftness she had not seen in him yet and she catalogued in her mind the way the parts fit together, the function of each.

He tore pieces from his shirt as he worked and wiped down each part with a kind of love. Greasestains in the white cloth like old blood. "You're going to need oil," he said. "It needs oil to work right."

"Where do I get that?"

"This gun you can make work with any oil. If it's other kinds they need something special but you don't need to worry about that for this one."

He stripped the gun further and laid out the parts in rows and sections so neatly it was as if he were arranging them on a grid. She looked on nearly mistyeyed with longing. He picked up a piece and turned it over in his hands and rubbed at a frayed and broken part with the pad of his thumb. "Firing pin," he said.

"What is it?"

"It hits the bullet when you pull the trigger. But it got bent or something, it doesn't fit any more."

"Can you fix it?"

"I need a hammer. "

She called for a hammer and one was brought and Jacob laid down the firing pin on the concrete floor and with a delicacy and precision she would not have expected of him he shaped it anew with a long and careful series of taps. He held it up and then laid it back down and tapped some more.

"There," he said. He held it up against what little light there was and then put the parts back together and racked the bolt and pulled the trigger and there was a new crispness to the sound it made.

"Good," she said, and Jacob only nodded.

#

She grows still more in the course of the winter. Even the cold cannot slow it. She grows until she is taller than the rest of them and finally the gangliness and ungracefulness of puberty catches her up and she stumbles sometimes when she walks. There are remarks but these she does not tolerate and there is blood spilled on the concrete of their collective home. Scars in places that show and a new respect accorded her. Nights, she dreams of words, she dreams of stories. All things must die, it is whispered, always in the background of every dream. She wakes always silently, the Colt close to hand.

The others too are growing but in different and stranger ways and to see it is something Cara does not understand. A new member Alexandra in one long night catches her staring but in the orange ovenglow it is taken as a sign of deadly promise and she is gone the next day before any are woken, found dead in an alley not a week later. Her clothes gone, her skin black with frostbite. Cara turns her over and her eyes are some strange unnatural color and behind her Sam vomits into the accumulated snow.

They take on more and move again this time into a subway tunnel which retains still a modicum of heat. When summer comes and she has turned fifteen she is nearly bursting with some unnameable hunger and though there is no apparent anger she kills a man who tries to stop their theft and it is the first time she has ever used the rifle. The bullet is a hollowpoint and blows out the back of his skull and the recoil knocks her back a step. The man has enough reflex left in his limbs to swing his arms up toward his face and then he collapses boneless onto folded legs and from there onto the floor.

They move again and then again and further still until they are far from where any of them have known, in a part of the city that could be called respectable. New and cleaner permacrete under their feet, open shops with holosigns. In their holebitten clothes and carrying guns and knives they look like children of war and they are chased and pursued. Cara evades them but the law catches others.

But there are still those who the streets hold and these gather to her as if she is a beacon in the dark. And they bring with them the gathered remnants of upperstory childhoods and among these gifts are knowledge of words, knowledge of technology. One named Anna brings them an omnitool.

#

"What is it?" Cara said.

"An omnitool. You wear it--here, see, it goes on like a glove. And then you press--"

There was a flare of scattered orange light and then there was a gauntlet of orange fire around her arm and she struggled to get it off, frantic, as if it was burning her. When it fell to the ground the outline of the interface skewed and stretched.

"What the hell is that," Cara said, and she had one hand already on the Colt and her eyes on Anna.

"It's just a tool," Anna said, her hands up and forward. Cara's reputation had grown and with it the knowledge of her danger and the things she had done. Even a history of her in the Reds had surfaced and these rumors made her out as some avenger goddess but she knew nothing of this.

"What does it do?" she said, after a long pause.

"Anything," Anna said. "Anything. You can get information, you can make things, you can talk to people anywhere."

"Show me."

"Okay."

Anna leaned down carefully and locked her eyes with Cara's as if it would ward off her death. Cara let her hand down and watched the gauntlet grow a circle in Anna's palm.

"What is that?"

"It's a keyring. For typing. You press down different ways and it makes different letters."

Her fingers manipulated the ring and parted segments, pressing them down. She turned her arm slightly and letters were appearing. _Hello there,_ they said. _How are you?_

Cara looked on, mystified.

"Echo," Anna said, "how tall is Mount Everest?"

 _"Twenty-nine thousand thirty-one feet, miss Anna,"_ the tool VI replied.

She grinned sheepishly and looked down.

"What's Mount Everest?" Cara said.

#

She took possession of it and it took possession of her. She spoke to it like a friend in its own right no matter the protestations of Anna at its unknowledge of her. And then she found the Net, the smaller one of Earth and its knowledge of ancients and then the larger one, the worlds beyond, and it consumed her. Sam could not raise her from where she sat nor could any of the others. She learned the interface and typed in questions one after the other until she fell asleep at the screen when daylight showed on the horizon. Others stole food for her and let her be.

But she knew more than any were aware of and she bought time in shreds to learn history and literature and language and it was a hunger built and stoked over countless years. Slaking it it was a ravenous thing that consumed her whole. _What is the history of Earth,_ she typed. _How do I learn every language. Who was Alfred, Lord Tennyson._

#

"Echo," Cara asked. "What do people do with their lives?"

There was a longer pause and then a noise as if the VI were clearing its throat. _"I'm sorry,"_ it said. _"I didn't understand your question. Would you like to know: what careers people pursue? What famous figures have said about purposes in life?"_

What careers do people have, she asked.

 _"People have many careers,"_ the VI said. It had a soft voice, something close to human. Motherlike, she might have called it, had she had a mother. _"Some choose to pursue professions in service. Social worker, public servant, emergency services, the military. Some--"_

"Tell me about the military."

_"Military. Definition: forces authorized to use lethal force, and weapons, to support the interests of its state and some or all of its citizens."_

"How do you join the military?"

_"Many nations require involuntary service for all citizens after they reach a certain age. Others allow voluntary enlistment by those interested in a military career."_

"What do you do in the military?"

"You die," Anna said from in front of her, and Cara shut of the omnitool on instinct and looked up.

"I didn't hear you."

"My parents were in the military. Not the ones here on Earth, the big one, the--Alliance, there's other parts to it but I don't remember what they were. They went to space. But they died."

"All things die."

"But you can go on living, too. You aren't going to join up, are you?"

Cara said nothing but the thought was in her head nonetheless and Anna squatted on the floor in front of her.

"You can't leave," she said.

"Why?"

"Because you're the only thing that keeps us all together. You know that, right?"

"What?"

"You're the only thing we all have in common. And you're the only reason we're getting by--I know you've been just reading for a while, but I remember when you were teaching me how to spot when police were coming, and I saved three of us just the other day from getting picked up. You do that. Teach people."

"I just tell you how to do things."

"That's teaching."

"But I don't mean to. I didn't even want to have a group, it just happened."

Anna's brow furrowed and she seemed confused. "But you're our leader," she said.

Cara paused and her mouth was open and there was a breath frozen somewhere between her throat and her mouth but she could not tell what word to make it into.

"What?" she said again, eventually.

"You're our leader."

#

She did not apologize to anyone after her absence with the omnitool but made still some small effort to make things right. More raiding parties for food and in better places, more lessons as she now thought of them on the subjects she knew. Some slow nights when all were hungry and there was no food at hand she would hold court on some topic of her choosing and teach all the group what she knew. They sat enthralled and attentive though she was blind to this and cared only that she cemented in her own head these things that she had learned.

She had collected now some twenty others who ranged from half her age to a few years above it and they were at all levels of knowledge and attitude and though some disagreed with her there were none who doubted her ability or authority. And though there were some who had been a few years in school and learned the histories of the country or some others of the world or even of the great new sections of the galaxy there were only some few who had read as much as she, and so they listened to her lectures though some were rambling and long and in the days that followed they came quietly to revere her for these strange kindnesses, her constant sharp attentiveness. Those who did not know what they needed she taught and those others whom they found in the streets she took in and taught as well until they were as much a part of this odd family as the others.

And they were a family, this collection of outcasts who had once scraped by alone, some from the outermost reaches of that sprawling city and others castaways from its innermost, an assorted many of educated and not, softspoken and loud, growing from its first few to nearly thirty at which point someone asked Cara if perhaps they should have a name.

"No name," she said. "If we had a name we'd just be a gang. We're just us."

#

But they had robbed one place too many or stolen too much, and the city took notice.

A task force was formed to round up those for whom the street was home and this growing family was no exception. They escaped once and then twice with a few caught and the third time nearly half were taken and Cara looked back as she fled to find Sam and Jacob among the lost.

And there were more raids. Out in the streets and even in the places they had found to sleep, in daytime and at night, the tension growing, the group whittled down to the last and desperate few. At last with no hideouts left to them they agreed together to turn themselves in.

Cara fled.

She found a string of places that would harbor her for a night but stayed only that long, the omnitool hidden under a long sleeve stitched together from other shirts. She let her hair grow longer and stole silently and it was sometimes weeks before anyone noticed what had been taken. A mutter of confusion among her victims and always too late.

She explored the city alone and when her rags drew attention to herself she stole clothing too and fitted herself awkwardly into it like kind of armor. Always the police searching, searching in the background, but she kept her head up and walked with purpose and she looked no longer like the street orphan she remained, hair growing over her eyes, herself growing older, older yet.

"Aren't you supposed to be in school?" someone asked her once on the street, and she pretended that she had not heard them and avoided the area for a month.

#

She wanders without clear intent for almost a season and grows into her eighteenth year thin and gaunt with pits under her eyes that harbor darkness. Sometimes she thinks of the others from the group and wonders how she might find them but there is no easy way. Instead she finds quiet places on the street or in coffeeshops and she is taken for a student and left alone and browses the omnitool's banks of knowledge for hours uninterrupted. Occasionally others attempt to strike up conversation but she stares at them balefully and goes back to her browsing. If they insist removes herself entirely.

Increasingly she wonders about the military. Her searches turn toward ships and guns and space, the vastness of which eludes her, and some nights when the shadows of derelict buildings block the lights from others she sees stars. She wonders if any light Thessia, or Palaven, or others, and she holds the omnitool up and watches the names appear beside the points of light, but none are names she knows.

Spring turns into the hot city summer and the crowds thicken and she grows tense among them, watching at every step for someone who might recognize her, for someone who might read her origins in her eyes. And then in the midsummer of her eighteenth year she passes by a recruiting station and turns into it and comes out with ink on her hands.


	3. Boot

"Hey boot," someone said.

She opened her eyes and there was one of the other recruits standing in front of her looking tired and jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

"Your watch," he said.

"Time?"

"0155."

She threw the topsheet back and stepped soundlessly down the ladder of the bunk and by the time she stood barefooted on the cold floor she was awake. She turned and jostled the arm of the woman on the bottom bunk and she too woke soundless into the earlymorning dark and blinked to clear her eyes. "Watch?" she said.

"Yeah."

The boy whose watch it had been shuffled off to sleep. Cara pulled her boots on and the other woman did as well. They pulled the rest of their uniforms together from the lockers at the foot of their rack and dressed and retrieved their rifles. Then they went out the front door together.

It was winter. The air was very cold and the camp was quiet as it ever was. The metal buildings shone gently under a sliver of moon and some thin high clouds covered the stars. They took to their patrol route and in the first few minutes they encountered a patrol from another company whom they nodded to and passed without comment. Rifles nestled into the crooks of their elbows, muzzles pointed down.

The camp was called Sharp's Point and the huge grey domes of glacial erratics lay scattered about it in the dirt. Beyond the wire there was a broad forest studded here and there with watchtowers that harbored yet a few last herds of deer. She had gone out on exercises and it was a strange new existence among the trees and the abundance of this kind of cleaner dirt. A leafy smell in the end of the summer, a strange tempered coolness to the air in fall. Now in winter a sharpness and clarity in the wind which woke her more fully still.

They made a circuit of the camp and passed another patrol talking quietly to each other and also the front gate where Marines watched over the floodlit road. A singular purpose and devotion in this small duty that called to her though the task was as inane as they came. To watch a gate. Who would attack this place of green recruits so far into the woods?

They walked on past more barbed wire and chainlink fence and after five circuits their watch had ended.

#

She slept soundly and when she woke she did so still in darkness. Some movement perhaps or a sound that had disturbed her. No sooner had she closed her eyes than the lights came on and the room came groaning to life. She stripped her bunk and remade it and dropped down to the floor without using the ladder and was one of the first standing in front of her locker when Gunny Ellison came down the floor.

He was an ordinary looking man when he was quiet but he had a yell that even Cara flinched from now and again and when he yelled his whole face seemed to open up. He walked down the floor and past each line of the assembled all in total silence and then on his second passing he would stop at all who needed correction and after a moment's pause would scream and demand twenty-five pushups and after watching would move down the line again. He paused at the woman beside Cara and glanced at a sloppy lacing before taking a breath for his yell. After this woman too had done her twenty-five he moved past Cara and further down the line.

#

The days were drills and PT and drills and more PT and on some days, good days, marksmanship practice. The adage Every Marine a Rifleman had not been let to slip since the first day of its utterance and even in the uncertain youth of the Systems Alliance the same held true for every Marine trained, in space or on the ground. She was among other things a very good shot though the Lancer was fickle to maintain and overheated far too quickly for her liking.

She was passed through boot camp to the School of Infantry with two thirds of her original class and here she came to learn about the many other resources available to a Marine: shotguns and grenades and rockets; various devices manufacturable by an omnitool and the full capabilities of the same; the armor which Marines wore in the field and its maintenance and upkeep; and one cold day in early spring, longrifles.

The company she belonged to came together to the range at an easy jog. Set there upon the bare turned earth there were a number of long rectangular shapes leaning up against the sandbag rests, and she sat down in front of her station and waited for an instructor. After a wait he came and squatted down next to her.

"You know anything about these?"

"No."

"This is a Hahne-Kedar Avenger. It's what you would call a long rifle, or a sniper rifle. Goes in first slot on your armor rack, that button there expands it. Go ahead and hit that now."

She did. And it flowered, flowered for her, expanded in her arms like something coming to life, and she was so startled at the way it grew she nearly dropped it. It was an inelegant unlovely thing but nonetheless when it settled into its fullgrown shape she felt it fit perfectly into her arms and her finger rested naturally along the line of the triggerguard. She could feel herself already honing the instinct for where the bullet would go.

"Well you certainly look like you know something about it," the instructor said.

#

She is not at first the best marksman in the group, and it is for the simple reason that she enjoys the firing of the rifle too much to care about its accuracy. Something about the kick of it into her shoulder, the thunder of the report. The instructor coaxes her back to accuracy over the course of some further sessions and before long she is as precise as the rest.

But there is more to her learning and this too she excels at with time. She stalks targets without any sign as to her presence and when she fires a shot even the instructors cannot tell at first where the shot has come from. During camouflage training she conceals herself so that even when all others have been discovered they cannot find her where she is hidden against the upper limb of a tree, an array of twigs about her like a bird's nest.

She ends her term at the School of Infantry with high marks and after a week of leave she passes into Infiltrator training.

#

The camp was far smaller than those she had been at before and its name was simply The Nest. Anyone who called it otherwise was ignored until they corrected themselves. Dug into the sparsely forested hillside there were the barracks and mess hall and armory and some other buildings and so remote was it from the main body of civilization that it was not even fenced off. The night passed warm and breezy above the barracks and around her were the unfamiliar breath patterns of two dozen others.

In the morning the lights snapped on at 0600 with an angry buzzing of fluorescents and Cara and the others woke sharply and dropped as always to the floor. But there was no drill instructor and when he did at last appear he was all but limping and held one hand to the side of his head as if to try and cushion it. When he reached the center of the room he turned to take all of the newcomers in and then spoke.

"Nothing today," he said thickly. "Too goddamn much to drink last night. We'll get started tomorrow."

He hobbled out much in the way he had come and after a moment of looking around most of the recruits climbed back into their bunks. Cara stood uncertainly with one hand on the ladder and then climbed up also and slept.

#

Her dreams were uncertain things. When she woke she would remember only that a rifle featured in them. But while she slept she dreamt of the same rifle that flowered into her hands but this time it continued to grow, grew until it had molded into the very flesh of her arm. The barrel lengthening until it was rooted in the dirt, the scope yawning open until it had swallowed her head entire. Inside there was a strange liquid blackness in which she could see reflected scenes from her life. The towers of her city, the lost portions underwater. Her first battle with the Reds and the halfsecond glimpse of the razor as it came down across her cheek. The first sparking glow of the omnitool as it lit in front of her, the leaders of the Reds reading at the fire, Tennyson's words echoing off the walls--

#

She woke with the words _All things die_ still present in her head and held even her breathing to listen to what was around her.

The barracks were empty. She looked up and looked around but there were none left sleeping. At the far end of the room she saw a bunk which might have contained someone else and she tidied her rack and slipped down the ladder and dressed and went to them. When she came closer she saw that they were not asleep but only reading on their omnitool, the brightness all the way down.

"Hey," she said.

"Mm."

"Where did everyone go?"

"Mess, I think." The boy shifted and eyed her. "What's your name?"

"Cara."

"Hell of a scar you got there."

She looked steadily into his eyes but he only smiled.

"You get that in boot?" he said.

"I was seven."

"Oh. Well, shit, I'm sorry. If it makes you feel any better I'll probably end up with a few eventually. Where you from?"

She opened her mouth and then closed it. She had filled out the intake forms long enough ago that the answers were not familiar to her and it took her a full ten seconds to answer.

"New York," she said, after the boy had already started to speak again.

"No shit. From Tennessee, myself. Tellico Plains."

"What was that like?"

"You tell me what New York was like and then I'll tell you about my neck of the woods."

She frowned almost imperceptibly and the skin of her cheeks stretched and her scar with it.

"I got in fights a lot, she said."

The boy continued looking at her and said nothing and she went on. "I ran with a gang for a while, and then I got out. We were just on the street."

"We?"

There were a few others. Then the police came and it was just me again.

The boy nodded, slowly at first and then faster, and then mouthed _fuck_ very clearly such that Cara could all but hear it spoken. "So you're a orphan," he said.

"Yeah."

"I didn't have the pleasure. My town was nice, family wasn't. Marines are a good way to get out of anything."

"You just joined to get out?"

The boy gave her a lazy and crooked smile and shook his head. "Naw," he said. My daddy was a Marine before the Alliance even started up, might not've been all too nice a man but he told good stories. Got deployed out on Mars for a while, kept listenen to him talk about what it was like out there. Prothean archives and that. Spent most a his time guarding there, a little bit down here in Venezuela, all that shit in the Rainforest Wars. So I got the itch from him."

"But why did you join?"

He shrugged. "Somethin to do, I guess," he said. "I like guns, and they don't let you play with mass-accelerator stuff anywhere else but here. Or any of the explosive shit neither."

"Favorite gun?"

"Avenger. That's the longrifle, not the automatic. So far anyway."

"Me too."

"So why'd you join up then?"

She shrugged much in the same way he had and then thought about it. "I guess to get out," she said eventually.

He nodded slowly and then faster and then shut off his omnitool and threw back the covers and sat up. Naked to the waist and toned from training but she looked away as if repelled and some expression flickered across her face that he did not catch.

"Sorry," he said, and pulled on a shirt. "You want to go eat somethin?"

"Yeah, I was thinking about it."

"Shit, I don't think I ever said my name. Tanner Lee Young."

He jumped down to the floor and landed heavily and put out his hand. Cara shook it.

"Shepard," she said.

#

The mess was still full when they arrived. The entirety of their class still lingering over their meals in conversation with their fellows. They filled their trays and looked for a place and sat eventually on either side of one of the long tables beside two slightly older girls who were drawing animatedly on a sheet of paper between them.

"If you put those shots right on, one was saying, you might have to go to A3 minus 2, but you should be fine with that."

"Should I go back to A3 minus 2 first, and then--"

"No, stay A3 minus 1, then when you start shooting, if you go high, come back to A3 minus 2."

"Morning," Tanner said, and took a bite of a roll.

The girls both looked up at the same time and in such a similar way that they seemed almost identical. Both darkskinned and with their hair in tight buns and their gazes each level and uninterested. "Morning," one said, and went back to the drawing.

Tanner shrugged and Cara started eating. The two girls had turned from distance adjustments to windage and she listened half to them and half to Tanner talking more about his opinions of the weapons they had used so far and others which were available. After a time he took her silence as a sign and quieted and when the girls too stopped talking she listened instead to the noise of the others in the hall. The laughter of a larger group discussing moments in boot camp, the ring of meal trays on steel rails. The scrape and rattle of silverware. She looked around. There were some older personnel but only a few and only after a second sweep of the room did she see the instructor who had come to the barracks in the morning, head lowered over his tray, chewing slowly.

"I didn't think an instructor would get that drunk either," Tanner said, and she looked back to him.

"He could be lying."

"Why would he do that?"

"I don't know."

"He looks bad enough that I believe him though. I been that drunk before. Or that hungover anyway. You ever drink?"

"No."

"Well once we both get out we can get ourselves over to a bar or somethin. Oh shit no, ain't legal is it. Well we'll find somethin."

The girls were listening from beside them and Cara fixed one with a steady glance and their attention slid away. Tanner continued to eat. "I'm sure there's somewhere we'll end up on shore leave that don't care too much about human rules," he said, and Cara fixed him with a glance as well and he was silent.

#

The next day they woke again at 0600 and their instructor seemed much improved by the day's respite. "Okay, everybody up," he said, and everyone took their time coming down as if to test his patience but he did not seem to mind.

#

They started the morning with a run about the perimeter of the camp and then followed a trail into the woods that ran along a sheer cliff that dropped into yet more forest. All of them breathing steadily and running in step though none of them sang the marching songs they had learned in boot.

After a time they came around the side of the peak and the view stretched into a cleared section of valley and Cara could see steel silhouette targets in the distance, stands for paper bullseyes, a few of the roughbuilt structures she had used in room-clearing drills. On a bluff ahead of them there were shooting platforms laid out and Cara leaned her head over the side of the cliff and saw that there were more situated below them on a series of switchbacks that ran down into the valley.

They slowed in their run and came to a halt in front of the shooting ground and the instructor faced them.

"You work in teams, he said without preamble. "One spotter, one shooter. Who here wants to be a shooter?"

All but two hands went up.

"Too bad," he said. "Some of you are going to end up as spotters. Now, we'll train you all for both roles, but once you graduate, you're either a spotter or a shooter. I've seen all your marksmanship scores, and some of them aren't that great. But for the ones who didn't do so well, I'm going to give you a chance to redeem yourselves. Now form pairs."

They grouped themselves quickly and Tanner gravitated to her as she had expected he would.

"Good," the instructor said. Now there's a rifle here that you might be used to, and down there in the valley there's a target in a window with a red spot on it. I want each of you to try and hit it. You two, up first.

It was the two girls Cara had sat next to in the mess hall and one of them sat down at the bench and expanded the rifle and laid it across the sandbag rest. She spent a minute hunting through the scope and then steadied the rifle, one hand hooked on a notch under the stock, the other light on the grip.

"That's like a klick out," she said.

The instructor only smiled from where he was looking through his spotting scope and when the girl fired there was a collective flinch among them all. Cara listened for the sound of the bullet hitting steel but there was nothing.

"Miss," the instructor said. "Centered, very low. Next."

The girl switched off with the other and she too spent some time hunting for the target and when she fired there was a long pause and then the low echo of the bullet hitting something other than metal.

"High and right," the instructor said. "Hit the roof. Closer, though. You're shooter, she's spotter. Next."

He pointed to Cara and she came to the bench but stopped short. Some fear in her all of a sudden though of what she could not say. Tanner walked past her and sat at the bench with the rifle and whistled quietly to himself as he searched, and within ten seconds Cara could hear his breathing steady and as she watched him his very soul seemed to come into his eye and the whole of his being was split evenly between there and his trigger finger. He took a breath and let it slowly out and at the bottom of the exhale he fired. Some many seconds later there was the noise of the bullet hitting metal.

"Hit," the instructor said. "Center of mass, a little low. Gut shot. Next."

Tanner was grinning hugely and got up from the chair and stood beside it. Cara waited before sitting down and when she did sit she was tense and willed herself to breathe. As if the whole of her destiny and the course of her possible futures came down to this moment as in fact they did.

She took up the rifle and looked through the scope. The words MAX MAG were displayed in the lower left corner. In the center the three pinlike crosshairs and below them the indication of distance. Almost a thousand meters exactly. She started to scan the houses but almost immediately she saw the redmarked one sitting in an attic window, a faint grey smear where Tanner's bullet had already struck.

She breathed in. Her posture was wrong but whatever instinct she had honed told her not to move. Though she could see only what was visible through the scope she could feel the way the rifle rested on the sandbag and brought it up so that the reticle hung slightly above the target's head. She breathed out. Slow and thin with a slight whistling noise as the air went through her teeth. Her heart beating suddenly thunderous in her chest and at the bottom of her exhale she waited for a space between beats and when the silence came only then did she fire.

The recoil kicked her off the scope and she resighted and looked to the target and saw the bullet strike, powdering into a cloud on the heavy steel.

"Hit," the instructor said. He looked away from the scope and down to her. "Center of mass. Just about right on the heart. You're shooter, he's spotter."

#

The instructor's name was Julian.

He had a manner which Cara had not yet encountered in the Alliance along with a training regimen that made no sense to her nor to any of the others. It contained within it all the elements which she was familiar with but in a strange and unpredictable order such that some mornings they would wake and begin shooting immediately and other days there would be no shooting at all.

But nonetheless he was a good teacher of strategy and tactics and expounded for hours on the particulars of infiltration, the importance of a thorough understanding of electronics and circuitry and technology on the whole. They spent hours in classrooms dissecting computers and locks and delved so far into the reaches of alien software that Cara found herself for the first time thoroughly overwhelmed.

She learned the uses of omnitools beyond what she was familiar with, from the hacking of combat mechs to overloading their systems to explode or damping their abilities until they were as good as dead and disabling them after. Thrown in with this were lessons in hand-to-hand with knives and fists and guns used as clubs and here especially she did not excel, her size used frequently against her despite all efforts to exploit what weaknesses there were. But she outshot everyone in pistol and rifle drills and was not only excellent at stalking but also at picking out those who stalked her and when she and Tanner worked as a pair they could hit every target at nearly two kilometers distant, moving or no.

"You're scary, you know that?" Tanner said to her one day, and she smiled freely in response and he laughed. "I guess you know then," he said.

But the training wore on her and the frayed edges showed. She was not the only one to sleep with her rifle as all had done in boot but she curled around it like a bedmate and when she held it at rest it was with a kind of easy grace that was noticed. "I wish you would hold me that way," another boy said to her once, and she nearly broke his nose.

She carried with her a kind of silence that spread to those around her and when she and Tanner sat at a table the conversations of the others around them would slowly stop and some were uncomfortable enough to move away. Tanner seemed oblivious entirely and talked at length about whatever best pleased him and Cara would listen and occasionally fix him with an amusedly bored look but they were partners, in their strange way, and she did not mind.

They trained together in all manner of weather from rain to the first snows and ran drills in buildings littered with usable tech, working in pairs and teams and sometimes alone with nothing but pistols and rifles and omnitools. There were hostage rescue and intel-gathering operations where she crawled inch by inch past blinking motion sensors and others where she was forced to shoot her way out of a compromised position as quickly as she could. Every make and manner of scenario was presented to her and as the training went on she slept less and less. Tanner and the others too feeling the strain until one night they were woken from the very start of sleep by abundant gunfire and Julian came in and told them to load up.

#

It was a training exercise. They had all heard of the test where some years fully half of participants washed out but no details had been offered as to its particulars. They assembled in full gear as other personnel fired assault rifles around them and somewhere down the slope there was the deep boom of a detpack exploding.

"Your enemies have just attacked your base," Julian told them. He took weapons from them at random and Cara found her rifle being yanked out of her arms and almost cried out after it. "Not all of you made it to the armory. You escaped, but without your weapons. Some without your armor," he said, and yanked a helmet off one boy's head and tossed it to the ground, and motioned for Cara take off an arm plate. "Your objective now is to evade capture, regain contact with the Alliance, and proceed from there according to their orders."

He threw a sloppy salute and turned around and walked back toward the barracks and after looking around at each other they turned and fled together into the trees.

#

They spent the first night huddled around a meager pitfire which they covered at the slightest noise. There were still some rounds being fired in the distance but they had been careful with the trail that they had left and Cara was on watch with a borrowed rifle, one hand on the stock and the other on the pistol holstered at her side. Her left arm felt bare without the armor. With no way to complete its integrity the helmet periodically blinked warnings about environment sealing. She ignored them as long as she could and then set the helmet quietly down and did not pick it up again.

The night was long and her watch had been set at four hours. Many noises in the forest but no intruders. Nightbirds in the high branches and squirrels awake under the fuller moon, other things too which gave the group a wide berth. Once a fieldmouse came close to the fire as if to warm itself and Cara waved a hand to chase it off but it would not go. She waved at it again and all but swatted it bodily into the fire but it merely moved a few inches out of reach and settled down again.

She watched its small whiskers twitching and the way the hairs around its snout moved as it sniffed the air. The pink feet weirdly delicate and splayed out against the dirt. The longer she watched the less she minded its presence until finally she let it alone and watched the forest again.

But nothing came. When the first light rose she woke with the rest and they shared what little they had in the way of food and tried to plan.

"Well we have to get in contact with the Alliance first," one of the boys said, and there was a pause as they reflected on this before Cara cut in.

"We need to send a signal they can't decode or track. We can use omnitools for that, but they can triangulate when we put out a signal."

"We could go back," one of the girls said, and everyone turned on her questioningly and she rephrased it. "One of us could go back to the base and send from their comms, hide it under all the other traffic, send along an encryption to use. Tell them to just use that and broadcast the signal on wideband."

"That would do it."

"Volunteers?" the girl said. Cara left her hand down and ultimately it was Tanner who volunteered and after they had composed and encrypted the message he struck out through the trees to find his way, the leaves closing behind him.

#

Some time passed.

They rotated watch and Cara slept fitfully in her armor. There had been no contact with anything or anyone and she wondered if they had in fact hidden that well or if Julian had other ways of tracking them.

"We should move camp," she said quietly, and not everyone heard her but those that did turned their heads.

"You mean leave him to find us on his own?"

There was a single shot as from a pistol in the far distance and she turned to it almost instantly and then said it again. "We should move camp."

"Was that him, you think? I thought they were using marker rounds, they wouldn't shoot him would they?"

"They might want us to think they did, I don't know why they'd shoot just one shot otherwise. Let's go to the valley and see what we can see, they probably set up the enemy position there."

"Who made you a leader?" someone said.

#

The camp was indeed in the valley, some new buildings constructed among those that they already knew. They sent a message to the Alliance and then moved on, as far from the location as they could get in case the broadcast had been tracked, waiting and watching for anyone to come after them. None did.

When it came, the return signal was weak and what they got was pieces at a time, fragments that they could not string together. They puzzled over it until finally it came clear and they decrypted it and read it aloud.

// ATTENTION ATTENTION ATTENTION  
>> YOU ARE CLEARED TO ENGAGE  
>> AND DESTROY ALL ENEMY POSITIONS  
>> WEAPONS FREE  
>> Message Ends _< <_

#

They set up in a staggered line along the cliff with their many rifles. Cara had borrowed one from a girl named Rhen who lay at her side with a spotting scope. The rifles were all custom now to some degree and hers had a thermal scope and an extended barrel and the tungsten ammunition chamber glowed a cool blue inside its housing. The extra weight of the barrel made it feel strange in her hands but she made an adjustment in her grip and the strangeness faded.

They spent some time cataloguing the various mechs which ambled about the base with their paint weapons, passing the findings along the line. They sketched on their omnitools the likely layouts of the buildings, the visible points of entry and exit, all the windows. Places where walls might be weaker to explosives. When they came together and compared their findings it was decided that there were twenty visible mechs with more likely inside, and that the buildings were meant a barracks, an armory, a vehicle pool. A Mako in pristine condition was visible under the prefab canopy but the longer they looked the more they were sure that it was only a shell.

The mechs were patrolling in groups and spaced far enough apart that eliminating a group at a time would not signal the rest. They planned four courses of fire and assigned targets and it came down to Rhen to give the signal. They held steady as they could and the noise of their breathing mingled with the noise of the wind.

"All on target?" Rhen said, and they affirmed it.

"Okay, she said. Fire, fire, fire."

They pulled their triggers and their rifles fired close enough together that the report was a single rattling crack. The first patrol went down and they switched aim to the second which had paused at the noise of the shot.

"On targets?" Rhen said again, and again they affirmed it. "Fire," she said.

The second firing left one standing without an arm and it must have sounded some alarm for more came out of the building they had designated the barracks. The third and fourth patrols were taking cover around the side of a building and Cara looked briefly away from her scope to judge the lay of the land and then eased back. "We should take that group in the open out," she said. "The ones that just came out of the barracks."

Her voice was a whisper but it carried far enough. Rhen nodded. "Line 'em up," she said, and they picked targets and settled in and again Rhen called Fire.

They went down as if they had been targets in a shooting gallery and there was the noise of someone's rifle steaming from an overload.

"Keep going," Cara said, "just pick them off," and they shot five more in a group that was moving out from behind a building and a single observer who had nearly made it to the trees and the upper torso of one looking out from behind the barracks. Nearly all the rest were now under cover and Rhen and the other spotters scanned the camp and reported this coolly.

They spent another hour watching and picking off the ones that ran out from behind cover and Cara noted movement behind windows, the opening and shutting of a door.

"There's more inside," she said, and one of the other spotters confirmed it. The barracks, he said. We're going to need to go in.

#

They split into two groups. Two spotters and two shooters on the ridge and the other seven climbing carefully down across the crags of rock and scattered trees with their rifles slotted onto their armor. They carried their pistols and checked their omnitools for signs of motion and Cara alone had a rifle out, this time borrowed from José, scanning periodically ahead for things their sensors could not pick up. Occasionally one of the shooters on the cliff would fire and they would stop and wait and then start again.

They reached the camp as the daylight receded and without her helmet she felt oddly blind. Faintly silhouetted outlines in front of her going down into the darkening forest. Ahead of them all the lighted windows of the camp. She paused and sighted through her illuminated scope but there were still no targets visible.

At the edge of the trees they paused and gathered around to revise their plan. "Let's set a charge on the Mako first," José said. "Then we can blow the armory, and while they're distracted, we hit the barracks."

Cara demurred and said that they should hit both buildings at once in separate teams but there was a general consensus that José's plan was the sounder one. Cara stayed at the edge of the woods to provide overwatch and the rest drew their pistols and made their way to the Mako's hangar.

Their shapes faded in and out of the gathering dark. In concealment on the ground she watched instead the windows and visible doors. Some scraps of movement but whether they were mechs or other things she could not tell. There was a shot from the ridgeline and a brief light of a spray of sparks somewhere out in front of the buildings and then nothing.

She swung back to the Mako hangar and they were already moving to the armory. Ahead of them a mech was exiting the rear door of the barracks and she went for her comm but she had no helmet. She went to her scope. Already exhaling and she let the reticle drop and even as the mech started to raise its weapon she had put a bullet through the side of its cranial plate and it dropped into the dirt. The others rounded into view and paused a moment to consider it and moved on.

There was more gunfire as they entered the armory and another shot from the ridgeline as they exited and they stacked up outside the door to the barracks. José set his pistol in his holster to bring up his omnitool and at the same moment the barracks door opened.

None of the group had a shot. Those on the ridgeline did not either. She settled and exhaled and fired and this time the bullet shattered the mech's front faceplate no more than a foot and a half from where José was standing. He went to his knees. Behind him a girl named Lilian was already stepping out, stepping in, starting to fire as the others moved in behind her, firing, firing, José still down on his knees with a hand scrabbling at his helmet, omnitool frozen on the screen with the detonation sequence.

After a time the firing faded. The group exited with Lilian holding her weapon above her head, two distinct smears of red paint showing across her chestplate. Someone stooped to see to José as the rest took covering positions.

Cara watched them and continued to scan for targets but there was nothing. One of the others motioned for her to join them and she rose uncertainly out of concealment and went to them.

José was bleeding freely from a deep gash on the side of his forehead. His helmet's faceplate had a small hole just above his eye.

"What happened?" Cara said.

"Shrapnel," he answered.

"Sorry."

He shrugged and then closed his eyes and leaned forward and made a dull noise of pain. "Deep," he said.

"How did it get through your shields?"

"Range was too short," a girl named Connie said. Shrapnel probably wasn't going fast enough for the shields to catch, fast enough to break the acrylic though.

She was applying medigel to the wound but José's breathing was light and thready and he was leaning further forward.

"Catch him," Cara said, but no one did, and she darted forward and caught his shoulder as he fell and then rolled him onto his back. Inside, she said, and she and Connie lifted him carefully into the building and the rest collapsed backward and then shut the door.

#

The room was littered with destroyed mechs and there was a crooked line of paint blotches on the wall near where they had come in. Cara set José down and unlaced his boots and stacked them and set his feet on top of them to keep them elevated. Connie was still activating the medigel and one of the others hovered uncertainly as if to perform CPR but Connie waved him off.

"You're hit," Cara noted absently, and the boy looked down to a small red patch on his chestplate and cursed and went outside.

"One of the mechs just started shooting as soon as we got in," Connie said. She put two fingers to José's throat and then drew them back. "Lilian took a couple since she was first, and then Jack shot it, but I guess he took one as it went down. We got the others pretty quickly after that."

"How's his pulse?"

"Steady. He'll be okay. Shock, I think, but the medigel's already working."

And indeed the skin was already sealing over the bone and his breathing had steadied. His eyes moved sharply under their lids and he opened them and then closed them again.

"Now what?" Connie said.

"We look around."

They searched the room for anything of use or interest and delved into the computers present there. It was not only a barracks but a command center of sorts and walled off in one corner there was an array of monitors and a row of lockers, a few odd pieces of gear lying on a small table. Cara gravitated toward the monitors and sat in the chair in front of them and made connection with her omnitool.

Connie was hacking the lockers behind her and they sprang open in sequence as she breached the locks. Out in the main area of the room the others were turning through every bunk and footlocker for intel or usable gear but Cara was absorbed in the code patterns on her omnitool and after some minutes of typing and checking and typing again she had cracked through enough layers of security to see the lay of the main directory.

"In," she said, and Connie looked over her shoulder.

"Anything interesting?"

"It's still encrypted. I don't know how much time it would take to get through, we should just copy it out and crack it later."

"You got enough drive space?"

"Yeah. You take it too, though. Good to have a spare."

They downloaded the full contents of the drives and placed remote mines atop the terminals, then came back to the main room. José was up and sitting on a footlocker, hand on his forehead. He raised his other hand in greeting. The remaining two of the group were checking the view out the windows and one of them had a hand to the side of her head and was talking with one of the spotters on the cliff. "They say no movement," she said.

"You still got the detonator?" Connie said to José.

"Yeah."

"I'll link you the mines I set. Don't blow them until we get out though, there's a couple on the terminals in here."

He nodded through the pain in his head and one corner of his mouth was contorted into a grimace that was almost a smile. "You know, if that had been a real guy, you would have saved my ass with that," he said to Cara.

"You're welcome."

He glanced upward to his wound and then let out a slow breath.

"You check the armory?" she said.

"No, Connie said." We just cleared it.

"See anything we could maybe use?"

"There were another couple terminals, I think. A lot of lockers. We spaced mines out pretty even to try and take out all of them, deny the enemy and all that."

"We should see what we can salvage. And you got everyone?"

"Yeah."

"José, can you walk?"

He rose unsteadily to his feet and then sat heavily down again. "Gonna be a minute," he said.

"Okay. We'll take Bev and you can have Seth. Just keep your head down and we'll come get you when we're done."

He smiled and grimaced again. "Well I don't suppose I can argue," he said.

#

They made their way into the armory. Some lights had been shot out in the fray and in the semidarkness of the room the red LEDs of mines blinked steady and threatening where they were clamped on to the platesteel lockers. Weapons in cages visible only in silhouette and shadow and they too glowed all manner of colors. Cara felt as if she were in a mausoleum and brushed her fingers over the cages as if she could somehow feel the emanations of their deadliness.

There's the terminals, Connie said, and they worked again to crack and download them as Bev covered the door, and when they were finished only then did they see to the cages. They were locked with simple padlocks and they took the butt of their rifles to one and smashed it off and opened the cages. Simple rows of stock and standard Naginatas and Avengers and a dozen pistols of several manufacturers. They broke another cage and there was more of the same. Then there was a recessed heavy storage locker set into the wall and it was some minutes with their omnitools before they cracked it, and it hissed open and revealed to them a flat black silhouette abovelit by blue lighting, a plain rectangle with ports in the side that let through a dim red light.

"Holy shit," Connie breathed.

"What?"

"That's a SPECTRE rifle."

"What does that mean?"

"Best long rifle in the galaxy, far as I've heard. All that stuff they teach us about range and windage, you don't even have to worry about it, you just aim. It just shoots straight."

Cara reached out hesitantly for it through the open door and only at the last second remembered to check if it had been trapped or otherwise tampered with. There was a wire strung to a d-ring at the base which she cut free and her omnitool revealed a secondary security system which she disabled as well. When she pulled the weapon free she touched the button which expanded it and it opened the way her own rifle did, but into a slimmer form, the scope pared down in size so that it sat closer along the barrel, the shroud over the muzzle larger and the bore wider. Just as quickly she collapsed it and fitted it onto the first slot on her armor rack, hefting her borrowed rifle again.

"I don't know it yet," she said, when Connie gave her a questioning look. "I might miss."

#

When they came back to the barracks José was standing and pacing and Seth was still watching the door.

"Anything?" José said.

"We downloaded the terminals," Connie said, "but we'll have to crack them later."

"Okay. We want to get out of here now?"

"Yeah. What were you thinking?"

"I wasn't. Just figured we didn't want to stay when we blew the place up. What about you," he said to Cara, "you got any ideas?"

"We should meet back up with the others, stay in their range as far as we can. Wait to blow the mines until we get back, see if it brings anyone else out."

"And if more come out and we're all the way up there?" Bev said.

"We can shoot them from the cliff."

Bev made a noise of uncertainty. José nodded to her. "I say we stay in the trees," he said.

Cara shrugged. "Or we can do that," she said.

#

They blew the mines once they were a fair distance away and despite their training they all flinched reflexively at the explosions. The Mako came apart under the four set on it and the whole of the armory building blew out in a shower of glass and fire. The corner of the barracks where they had set mines on the terminals tore open into a jagged metal hole and after the fires had consumed what they could there was nothing but small embers in the remains and the light of the moon.

They waited in concealment in the forest and watched for movement but there was nothing. Neither mechs nor humans came to the wreckage though they waited for the better part of an hour. They breathed steady and slow and tried to match the breeze and only when they had swept the area several times with scopes and eyes and omnitools did they call back to the others.

They made their way up the cliff along the many switchbacks and past the benches they had used in prior training. Memories at each of shots missed or struck and Cara remembered one taken at the furthest part of three kilometers with a borrowed scope, rifle elevated hugely against the draw of gravity and the shot fired and then falling over some several seconds and then the noise, distant, muffled, of the impact on steel. And then there had been Tanner's reach out to slightly further and Rhen's centered headshot at two klicks and José's three hits in the center of mass on moving targets within the span of thirty seconds. All old stories now which nonetheless still held grains of excitement for her as they did for others.

They reached the top and the others and kneeled to rest.

"You guys get through okay?" José said.

They looked up at him wearily and Rhen was the first to observe the remnants of medigel that still traced over the wound on his forehead. "Saw that shot," she said. "Was that Cara?"

"Yeah," Cara said.

"Mech didn't even get out of the building and you had it."

They debriefed each other for a few more minutes and then took to their omnitools to send word back to the Alliance. The reply came back almost immediately:

// ATTENTION ATTENTION ATTENTION  
>> EXERCISE COMPLETE  
>> RETURN TO MAIN BASE FOR DEBRIEF  
>> Message Ends _< <_

#

Tanner and Lilian and Jack were already waiting when they reached the main barracks. Though they had remained there resting for hours they looked nonetheless weary. They had been stripped of their weapons and armor and Lilian ws the first to speak up.

"We're getting kicked out," she said.

"Of the Infiltrator program?" Rhen said.

"Yeah."

Rhen cursed quietly and her mouth twisted afterward as she tried to find words but there were none. Tanner looked up at Cara and there was resignation in his eyes mingled with regret. "Hope you made a few good shots," he said.

She nodded at him and then looked to Lilian. "They're washing you out?" she said. "I don't know what you could have done better to not get hit. Shields would've taken it, if it were real."

"I know."

"I'll tell Julian the same thing if I get the chance."

"You're going to fight for her but not me?" Tanner said.

Cara said nothing and Tanner came to his feet. "You're going to just let me wash out?"

"I don't know what happened to you, so I can't say anything about it."

"You could make something up."

Tanner was taller than her by a few inches and he stood over her as if to threaten her but she did not move. Her eyes locked to his, not an inch given nor any sign of fear.

"You have to do something," he said.

"No."

He seemed not to be aware of the others around him and he made to set his hands on her shoulders but she put her arms up and slid them away. A flash of open anger in his face. He moved his arm out as if to strike her and she stamped hard on his foot and drove her booted heel down onto his knee hard enough to break it and then continued down to the floor. All the others surging in to hold her back and Tanner screaming with his fibula splintered at the edge and ripped whole from its adjoining tendon and a dozen small shards driven through the skin. He dragged himself backwards to the wall but Cara did not pursue him.

"You crazy fuckin bitch," he said, but the words came out ragged and choked and fearful.

"I know your kind," she said. "I knew what you were from the start."

#

"That was a bit of an overreaction," Julian said. "Don't you think?"

She was sitting in the small office that took up a corner of the camp's armory and Julian was watching her from across his desk. Some shelves with binders and old textbooks and a mesh locker with an array of rifles. A terminal on the wall behind the desk.

"I didn't know how hard he was going to hit me," she said. "I didn't want to find out."

"But you broke his leg badly enough that he won't be able to walk properly for... I think they said six months? I looked at the x-ray. It's nasty. Perhaps you think he deserved it?"

"He was dangerous, sir."

"He wouldn't have made it this far if he wasn't."

"I mean to us."

"Us?"

"The others in the program."

"I see."

He waited a beat and just looked at her and she looked down to the floor.

"He would have hurt us," she said, haltingly. "If he had gotten the chance. The girls."

Julian opened his mouth and mouthed _oh_. "Do you have any evidence to support that?"

"No sir."

"Then as far as any court would be aware, you were defending yourself, but grossly overreacted and injured him enough to make it virtually impossible for him to complete the remainder of this program. Or any program. Anything else to justify yourself?"

Cara sat still in her chair looking down at the floor. Arms crossed, a finger rubbing idly over the nail of her thumb. "Don't let Lilian wash out," she said. "She doesn't deserve it."

Julian let out a short barking laugh which turned into a smile and he shook his head slowly from side to side in wonder or disbelief. "So no justification, then."

"No sir."

He chewed his lip for a moment and looked at her and she looked back. He was in his mid or late thirties and if he had ever been a soldier it was hard to tell. A slack look about his jaw and his figure was failing where he had not kept up with exercise but his eyes were as sharp as any soldier's she had ever seen and the longer she looked the more she felt as if he was being picked apart by some alien intelligence entirely incomprehensible in its analysis. Some ruthless and intricate calculus behind those eyes as to her fate.

"Tell me something," he said. "Why did you take off your helmet?"

"In the exercise?"

"Yes."

"It wouldn't stop telling me that my environment seals weren't intact."

"And that was worth losing all comms with your squad?"

"It was distracting. "

"There's an option in the suit parameters which would have stopped the warning. In the settings menus. If it ever happens again, use that."

"Yes sir."

He pondered her again for a moment. "I think you'd have done well as an infiltrator, he said. But if I put you through for it now they'd have my head. I don't know how badly you want to see action, but you're going to have some shit duty for the next few years. If you re-up after that, maybe you can work your way back into it. I don't know. Anywhere you wanted to go, out there?"

He made an expansive gesture upward and she did not comprehend for a moment what he meant. Then she understood.

"Elysium," she said.

Julian laughed. "That's not going to happen. I could maybe get you near enough that you'd go there on shore leave, but... Christ, it would almost be worse if I sent you there after this. Like I was rewarding you."

"Then I don't know."

"Well they always need crew for patrols out there--that's the Skyllian Verge, where Elysium is. I can put in a request to get you on a ship, out there, but that's four years with some sporadic shore leave, all on the same boat."

"I can do that."

"It's not pleasant, I'll tell you that."

"But I can retrain as an infiltrator? After I'm done?"


	4. Deck

She leaves Earth on a shuttle bound for Titan, watching the planet recede in the rear window. So small. A haze of satellites and orbital platforms obscuring the view. She raises two fingers and holds the planet like a marble between them, squeezes. Within the hour it is lost in the black.

There is still more training ahead of her and this she accomplishes with the same determination as the rest. Titan is a barren hell of a world and tests her endurance and in one notable incident claims the life of another trainee. She learns null-g combat on an orbital platform whose name she does not retain and then is shuttled to Arcturus.

She arrives with her record already known to those above her. A pariah, she is shuffled from one command to another until someone takes pity and takes her in to stay. She finds her place on the Sixth Fleet's SSV _Tripoli_ and after a month in drydock they set out for patrol in the Verge.

The _Tripoli_ is a cruiser with a full company of two hundred Marines and a hundred assorted crew. Few welcome her. Even among the Marines she can find little kinship and she performs the duties she is ordered to, participates in PT drills in the launch bay, marksmanship practice with bullet traps set against the bulkhead door. In her off hours she reads Tennyson, browsing the old poems with a fresh eye and finding them lacking. She deletes the volume from her omnitool with all its marks and notations and finds other things.

But a ship in the black is no place to be solitary and after some months she finds others who are also outcasts and they form a ragged and tenuous group which is less one of friendship and more one of necessity. She hazards her luck at cards and loses and participates in some heated discussions of strategy and tactics both of games and of war. Some others are readers too and in the dullness of watch duty she discusses poetry and fiction and the odd book on history and listens endlessly to recorded works, during waking hours and sleep, until the voices of the narrators seem to dictate the events of her life.

And she grows. Nineteen when she starts her service and then twenty and twenty-one. Lean and small with her head still shaved to a fine stubble and eyes bright as glacial ice in sunshine, flatly inquisitive, cheekbones sharp and high and fine and her cheeks sunken from a legacy of hunger. Her neck slender enough that some call her Crane but no nickname sticks, not even Bones or Scars as she had once responded to.

Hers is dull work and routine softens her but she does not hesitate to glean what she can from her glimpses of the ship's workings or politics. The ways the Captain speaks to the crew and the order of duty which the XO lays out, the tasks necessary, the methods of accomplishing them. The ship is large but in her rotation through the many duties necessary to its maintenance she becomes privy to how small in fact it is in the minds of those who command her, how cramped. Sometimes on watch in the CIC she can listen to the Captain direct their course and the many at their stations assisting him. Always a kind of awe for the many things he holds in his head, his grasp of the myriad intricacies of command.

#

"The Captain doesn't know what he's doing," Nena said.

Cara looked at her questioningly and Nena burst out laughing along with the others.

"You mean you don't see it?" she said.

"I'm not sure I even know what to look for."

"Well there's the inventory shortages, and the engine room shit that was going on a month ago, and him constantly fucking up our guard patterns—"

"And the patrol routes, Linda said."

Nena made a noise of agreement. "And the patrol routes," she said.

Cara looked to them uncomprehending and Nena pushed her chair back from the card table and onto two legs and leaned back against the wall as if to take Cara in at a distance.

"You really haven't noticed," she said.

"I was always just impressed that he managed to keep track of everything."

"But he doesn't. You watch him, you'll see it."

"What would you do differently?"

"Delegate. He tries to do too many things himself, ends up slipping. He doesn't use his lieutenants well or the Commander either, and he's always second-guessing the section heads, ends up screwing with their recommendations so that they don't work and blaming it on them—like that time the other week where we nearly ran out of fuel because he decided to push us through another patrol without stopping to re-up at Elysium."

"Oh."

"And then he kept bitching to anyone who would listen that the nav officer fucked the calculations and that was why we ended up short, but it was all his fault. And then there was the time that our armory inventory got messed up, which I remember because I was the one who inventoried it—"

"I remember that," Linda said, and Nena continued.

"—but he must have fucked up when he entered it all into the log, because I counted _every_ goddamn rifle and ammo block, and there is not a chance that I screwed it up. Spent hours on it, and then he comes back yelling about how we had so many fewer than we were supposed to have, and that there must have been someone stealing and we had to run an investigation... eventually the requisitions guy calmed him down and got him to look at my sheet again, and he never said anything but I think he knows he fucked up."

"Why is he captain, then?" Cara said.

"Because the incompetent people always get to be captain somehow. Well. That's not all true, but the captains usually don't know nearly enough about what goes on when they're not on deck staring at it. They don't make rounds and talk to the crew and learn about how much everyone knows about what they do, and so they just think that everyone who hasn't had as much training as they have is just stupid and doesn't know what they're doing."

"He tried to fly," Rob put in. "Sat down in the helmsman's seat and took the controls and nearly burned out the drive core. That was all the stuff in engineering, the other week. They had to shut down the core and check for overstress."

"Oh," Cara said again, and so quiet and almost defeated was her tone that the others laughed again.

"Sorry to completely shatter your mind," Nena said, and Cara shrugged and half smiled.

"So what else would you do?" she said.

"Probably spend my whole day just walking around checking on everyone. Not telling them what to do, just asking about what they're up to. After I did that a couple times I'd probably have reports enough to fill out to take up the rest of the day. Ends up being a desk job apart from when you're commanding through a firefight."

"How do you even get to be captain, anyway?"

Nena groaned and closed her eyes. "A simple thirty-step process," she said. "Usually involving sucking off or sucking up to a lot of people. Or just having a couple high ranking relatives, that's usually what happens. A guy's uncle or grandfather or whatever says hey, how about I get you your own command, and there it is. You have to go through all kinds of officer training, but whether or not you actually get a ship is up to all kinds of upper brass you normally never see. You get some of that on Arcturus, sometimes, the big shots walking around. Saw Anderson once, actually."

"No shit," Linda said.

"Yeah, walks a real hero's walk, too. Doesn't strut, but Christ doesn't he just look like the Alliance poster boy. That and being first out of N7—"

"We ever going to finish this hand?" Rob said.

"Lay it down," Nena said, and Cara flipped the last card of five on the table and there was a series of groans and a cackle from Linda.

"Got you all beat," she said, and threw down her hand and scraped the pot into her arms. Cara expected someone to contest her but no one did.

#

She turned 22 at a fuel depot near Joppa. There was a small celebration among those who knew her best which culminated in a gift that the others of her group had purchased some time previously and had shipped to the depot at God knew what expense. It was a targeting visor by Ariake and though it looked frail and fragile in her hands she slipped it onto her head and activated it and the target readout sprang up sharp and clear, a thin film of holographic light, cool blue. Some Japanese characters scrolled down the readout and then the targeting lines appeared. She blinked them into focus and looked around, and it autotagged everyone in the room as she swung past them, noting friend-or-foe chips, vital points, range and elevation.

"No goddamn way you'll miss anything now," Nena said, and though Cara thought of a response— _who said I've missed anything yet?—_ it caught somewhere in her throat and instead she stepped forward and hugged Nena roughly with an arm, trying not to snag the visor in her hair.

"And you all too," she said, and the others piled in and she spread her arms to take as many of them in as she could.

"You gonna say thank you?" someone joked, and she felt that catch also in the back of her throat and swallowed it down.

#

Her space dreams are stranger than the ones of training, confused and plotless. The figures she passes by have no faces, the landscapes are shifting. Sometimes towers of molten black that resemble the city and other times hills that ripple like the sea. She cannot stand upright anywhere and even in her dreams she can feel her fists straining in helplessness. One morning she wakes to a hand sore from tensing and the cramps of it follow her throughout the week.

On deck she pays closer attention to the Captain's comings and goings and orders, the way he speaks, the way he does not. He has a constant look of weariness about him, he responds slowly. When he walks past her at her post she makes sure not to turn her head but she watches him nonetheless, the look on his face already half defeated.

"He looks like he's twenty years older than he is," she says one day, among friends, and they nod and agree though none have any sympathy. But she wonders how much is incompetence and how much simply the weight of the duties he has shouldered and keeps quiet when Nena and others berate his failings, wonders if one day she might try her hand at the job herself.

#

When the ship turned she could feel it in the small sway that the a-grav decks did not correct, hear the stress in the outer hull. Standing at her post outside the Major's door she looked to her partner on watch and he looked to her. Nothing spoken and yet an acknowledgement of something strange.

The comm broadcast came ten minutes later.

_"All hands, all hands, stand to. This is the Captain. The colony of Elysium has come under attack; details are still unclear. We are currently taking the fastest course to assist, ETA five hours. All hands, stand by for combat. "_

The broadcast cut out with a snap and again she looked to her watch partner. He touched his fingers to the side of his helmet for the comm and said, very clearly, "Fuck."

#

They blaze out of FTL into a sky full of fire.

She has seen Elysium before, the orbital platforms sculptural in elegance, the surface a clean blue marbled with clouds and snow and broad sweeps of mountainous land. But there is a flag cloud of black smoke blowing off a shoreline and a band of forest afire from the river to the ocean and orbit is crowded with ships burning and broken, hundreds in number; shuttles retrofitted with cannon and missiles; fighters holed through by mass accelerator fire, left pilotless and adrift; pleasure craft painted black for stealth and visible only by the glowing edges of GARDIAN wounds; escape pods locked in gyrating spirals; interceptors from a half dozen systems away dragged on makeshift tethers through FTL; ships open to hard vacuum and in which the dead pilots sit in EVA suits riddled with shrapnel or whole and asphyxiated; bodies burning, bodies broken; heads and limbs drifting in a haze of smoke and debris that stretches miles from its epicenter, at which hangs the sleek enormity of the SSV _Agincourt_.

Cara watches this from the viewscreen of the shuttle, watches the ships drift, the planet smolder.

#

They landed in the capitol city of Illyria. Some larger ship had gone plowing through the taller buildings and dug a scar into the ground, and the impact had cut water mains, electric lines, streets. At the end of the scar the ship lay half disintegrated, still smoking.

Lieutenant Hughes was the CO on mission and he had spread First Platoon's four squads out across the western approach. Cara was in second squad with Sergeant Banks and she brought up the rear with her longrifle and scanned the windows and doorways, watched the streets ahead for enemies. There were many dead. Some had fallen or jumped from the upper stories of buildings and others had been burned. All were human and she could not yet see any uniform that might be of an enemy.

They crossed the smoking scar that the ship had carved across the city and into a common green space and she saw then her first alien, a batarian, sprawled in the dirt with a shotgun just out of reach. Some mercenary armor in shades of red and grey and black. It had been shot many times in the chest and lay in a congealed pool of indigo and so absorbed was she in the sight that she fell behind her column for a few steps. The four eyes staring upward, sightless, the greenish tinge of its skin now paling, the odd gill-like crests across its cheeks. When one of he squad called to her she turned away and carried on again.

There were other shuttles in the district and all were empty. Too few. There had been a larger attacking force but most had fled and now only the wrecked shuttles remained, smoking from their thrusters, viewscreens stitched with constellations of holes.

Sergeant Banks stopped and had them spread out to sweep the area, and Cara checked the windows of the buildings. It was built up very high for a new colony world and the buildings were not simple prefab units but the beginnings of skyscrapers, some thought put into their design and construction. Large sections of mirrored glass and beams that stood out like veins or bones, smaller buildings which swelled in the way of asari architecture, organiform and strange, rippling upward from the ground. She saw movement in a shattered window, but it was another human.

"We have wounded up here," she was yelling, and Cara considered that she might have been made to yell it, to lure them.

But it was not a trap and when they did reach them the wounded lay in various states of dying along one wall of an office. Someone had come in through the window and thrown a grenade and the floor had collapsed through three stories, the center of a business that had handled such mundanities as the import and export of consumables from other colonies.

The woman's name was Charlotte. She had been in the restroom when the grenade had blown and Cara noted the absurdity of the toilet paper trailing from her shoe, a stocking pulled only halfway up her leg.

"I just do accounting," she kept repeating, staring at the wounded.

They made calls to the hospital but it had been one of the first locations hit. Though the _Tripoli_ had a medical suite most of the casualties were bad enough that they could not be moved. There was one who was nearly in half with a wound to her midsection and another whose face had been all but sheared off by the explosion and who held a wet towel numbly to the worst affected side, staring down at the floor. There were some lesser injuries from debris and burns but medigel was spared for the critically injured.

Cara and others set to searching for more survivors. The collapsed floor was unsteady and they made their way down to the lowest level on ropes tied to undamaged columns, searching the rubble along the way, checking HUDs for heartbeats or movement. But there were none and was none and they reached the bottom where the rubble had blocked the light and turned on their helmet lights. Cara drew her pistol.

They started to pick up thready heartbeats somewhere under the fallen remnants of the building and she turned over the debris in the dense and echoing silence. She found a man with no visible wounds but who was still very much dead and another man who had a piece of steel rebar driven through a lung. He was still breathing, a pink froth lingering at the corners of his mouth. He tried to speak but could draw no air. Cara applied and activated medigel and told him to lay still and continued to search.

There was another heartbeat under a ceiling panel. When she lifted it she found a batarian with a shattered arm coughing wetly onto the beam that lay across him, and as she moved the panel aside he lurched as if to free himself but the beam held him down.

"We knew you'd show up before long," he sneered, and then coughed again until he was out of breath.

"Who's we?"

The creature looked up at her with all four eyes and she could not read its expression. Too many alien lines and furrows to tell any emotion though the hatred in his translated voice was good enough sign.

"I hope they get you too," he said, and started coughing again, harder. A secondary strut of the beam had cracked his chestplate and perhaps broken some ribs and he lay there wheezing for another minute as she stood over him. When he had finished she put a booted foot on the strut and pressed it further onto him until he grunted in pain.

"What are you trying to do, human? Kill me? Why don't you just shoot me and get it over with."

His voice came through the translator program deep and rough and strangely liquid, as if heard through bubbling water. She raised her pistol and then turned it side to side, considering it.

"You would have to make it worth it," she said.

"I'm going to die. There's nothing you can do about that."

"I can make it faster or I can make it stop. But it's up to you."

"Just shoot me."

But she holstered the pistol and called for others to help move the beam and when it was finally moved it was revealed that he had a pistol of his own, just beyond his reach. He tried to make his broken arm move toward it but it would not.

They mag-cuffed him despite his injuries and applied medigel where it was most urgent, no one speaking. He cursed at them the whole while, spitting and snapping, and when he came close enough to graze the medic's knuckles with his teeth Cara stepped calmly forward and drove his head back into the rubble with a boot. She held him there as they tended to the rest of his wounds and then hauled him up and marched him to where the others were waiting.

#

They stayed on-planet for three weeks.

Their first days were dedicated to the humanitarian efforts of searching for survivors and distributing supplies, but when relief ships came they turned to searches. Not all of the attackers had fled the planet in shuttles and some few too injured to move or otherwise trapped remained. Some had simply elected to stay and harry the rescuers and they killed four Marines in the first week, until reinforcements came and cleared every building, floor by floor, room by room.

Cara participated in the clearing with the rest of her squad and though they saw no action there was nonetheless a tension at each corner and at the head of every stairwell, alert for traps or ambushes or whatever else might come. They cleared three smaller buildings before they were rotated back to search efforts and from these back to the _Tripoli_.

The media called it first a blitz and then the Blitz and finally the Skyllian Blitz, a lightning raid on the heart of Alliance expansion by those increasingly incensed by its speed. Pirates, slavers, warlords. Most were batarian but there were some turians too, scattered humans, a sizable coalition of disparate interests pulled together for the common cause of wiping out Elysium entire. But the _Agincourt_ in orbit had made for a potent defense and even the dozens, hundreds of ships were no match for an Alliance frigate armed to capacity and a crew with a vengeful streak. The first and second attacks had been repulsed and only the last remnants of the third had made it to the planet's surface. And these irregulars had taken shots at whoever they could see, civilian and military alike, setting fires and bombs and shooting at anything that moved, laying down a wide swath of destruction until the colony's own defense forces repelled them through the streets to their shuttles and back into the black. All in all a victory for the Alliance though the dead would not have thought so.

The batarian she had found was brought aboard the _Tripoli_ for questioning and she did not see nor hear any more of him. There were whispers of what he revealed in interrogations and talk of other attacks in the future but the conversation that spilled over into the mess hall and on deck was of retribution, what targets might be chosen and struck and who would be deployed. Among the more hawkish of the _Tripoli_ 's crew there was some debate over how best to convince the Captain to pursue but he would hear no argument and listened solely to the word of Alliance command.

But in the end the action came anyway. They were tasked with rooting the pirates out of their bases in the Verge, one asteroid at a time.

#

She took a seat near the starboard viewscreen on their last night in orbit, watching the charred remnants of forest smoke and smolder.

The fire had consumed some several thousand acres and what had been green was now a charred black mottled with grey. She wondered what had lived there, if anything, or if it had been empty except for the animals. The cities too had burned in places and not only Illyria had been attacked. Some others had the crater marks of heavy weapons and whole buildings had been toppled so that they lay sideways in the streets, still others had been razed entirely by mass accelerator fire, holes stitched into the roofs of the low prefab houses, some missing roofs entirely or blown apart so that no trace remained but the foundations.

She wondered how long it would take them to recover, how long it would take any of them to feel safe again. Then she rose and went out the door to sleep.

#

The first asteroid they hit was known by the reference tag X05/A9. It was a pirate rock in the middle of open space, stabilized by makeshift fusion torches, rendered habitable only by the prefab shelters worked into the hollowed-out interior. A shuttle landing bay was visible from the exterior but gravimetric scans could not tell the depth of what lay beyond.

They took shuttles into the main hangar and gunfire greeted them as they opened the doors. They piled out and took cover behind the powered-down thrusters, returning fire as best they could, laying down suppressing fire into the halls until another squad tossed a grenade. Once the shooting had stopped they checked their motion sensors and sounded off on the comm and then moved out.

Cara had swapped out the barrel of her rifle to better suit the close quarters and she took up positions behind the rest of her squad as they went forward, scouting ahead as far as she could see. There were several larger spaces that they passed through without encountering anyone and they cleared each room along the way. In one room there was a tunnel which led deeper down into the rock and her sergeant and another led them down and the third and fourth squads continued elsewhere.

Someone had started to shut off the lights and they made their way down the next hall in darkness with only their helmet lamps to illuminate the way. There were twelve of them in the two squads and they checked for hidden doors and scanned ahead as best they could for signs of movement but there was nothing. And then a man came screaming out of the dark and a wash of blue energy lifted all into the air and sent them flying back and there was a confused eternity of gunfire, a choked screaming across the comms and smoke and the sound of shattering glass and when it ended there were three more dead, two Marines, one enemy.

"Biotic," Nena said.

And there were more. They entered the next room to a haze of blue barriers and were forced back again by the same energy that had blown them back in the hall. Nena took one barrier down with her shotgun and Cara followed up with a blast to the woman who had set it but one of the other Marines was screaming, rifle contorting into strange shapes in her arms and in another moment she was airborne, floating, spinning, drawn toward a tiny black spot which folded her once and then again until her armor splintered and gave and her spine snapped with a long and echoing crack and drove bone through her lungs. Cara looked on in sudden awe until Nena's shotgun roared again and the second barrier fell.

The one behind it stumbled back and Nena shot him, the blast overloading shields and breaching armor and Cara shot him again and he collapsed back onto the floor breathing raggedly. A lung shot perhaps or a something that performed the same function in his kind. He took a long time to die and eventually Cara shot him again with her pistol to save him worse suffering.

They pushed on. Hand to hand battles in the cramped tunnels and some were small enough as to necessitate them going single file. Doors opened and the occupants emerged with rifles or knives or any improvised weapon close to hand and they shot them until their weapons overheated and then moved in.

They cleared rooms in groups of three and Cara switched to her pistol and shot a barefaced turian twice high in the chestplate and then in the head and then the asari who made a dive for the rifle he had dropped. Nena shotgunned an armored human in the chest once and then twice and only the third shot made it through the shields and faceplate and sent the woman sprawling to the floor.

"Aren't there any civilians on this rock?" Nena said.

Sergeant Banks called for backup in the hall. They came out into another firestorm and laid down suppressing fire which lit the hallway with all manner of colors and the two shooting from the room at the end slumped and died. Silence followed after and the noise of breathing.

"Sound off," the Sergeant said.

They sounded off and it was discovered that only seven of them had made it. The rest lay scattered along the path they had cleared and they took a moment to pause and then moved on.

The last room was a maze of crates and other storage containers and they spread out through them but there were no enemies. They cleared the crates and checked corners and side rooms and every square inch of wall but there was nothing.

There was a control center cobbled together from old monitors which lay at the center of a nest of cabling and wires and the Sergeant tried a few access codes and then shook his head.

"Anyone know how to crack this thing?" he said.

"I do," Cara said.

He gestured for her to try and she linked in with her omnitool and cracked the encryption like a nut. Arrays of files suddenly clear and accessible and all the systems of the rock open to her.

"I've got directional controls, she said, life support systems, comm settings, cargo manifests..."

"Can you copy it all over to my omnitool?"

She did so and then copied it to her own and saved it for later. "Done," she said.

"Is there any way we can find out who was on this rock?"

"I doubt they kept a passenger log."

"Just look."

And she did and found nothing but a plaintext activity log high up in an untitled directory, notes of some bored controller on the ships passing through the systems and the goings-on of the rock. There were no names but some of the individuals referenced were described and she wondered if it might help with identification of the dead.

"Something," she said, "but no passenger log. No friend or foe tags or anything like that that we can crack into."

"Damn shame."

No sooner had he finished speaking than he was shot. He went down heavily and fast and there was no sign of the one who had shot him. Cara had already gone to cover and she dragged Nena with her and yelled at the others to do the same but another took a bullet to the head and went down as well.

"Where's he shooting from?" Cara said.

No one knew. Nena leaned out far enough to see around the corner of the crate and a shot glanced off of it and dug into the floor. She looked at it and then where it had hit the crate.

"Up high," she said. "Top of one of the stacks."

"Any idea what direction?"

She looked again at where the bullet had struck. "If we're going straight from this crate, ten o'clock," she said.

Cara stepped out on the other side of the crates and took a shot at the ceiling in a random place and then stepped back. No return fire and a slight scraping noise amplified by the helmet's audio pickups.

"Closer to eleven," she said.

"Need covering fire?"

"Yeah."

"On it," she said, and the two others in the squad readied their weapons and after a three-count they turned the corner and started firing.

Cara slipped out after the fire had started and sprinted lightly down the rows until she was beyond the shooter's position. Her motion sensors showed no moving targets but she scanned the tops of the crates and when the shooter fired she locked onto the sound and closed in. She had stowed her rifle and pulled her pistol instead and she ran with it pointed ahead of her and barely moving at all with her step.

The shooter fired again and Cara paused beneath him. She was just forward of his position and when he fired next she took a foothold in the nylon webbing that surrounded the crate and started to climb. Another shot. She climbed higher until she was nearly at the top and once the shooter fired again and once she had fixed in her head the exact position of the rifle she reached up and hauled forward on the barrel and pulled the rifle and shooter off the crate together to fall to the floor.

It was another woman. She screamed once before hitting the ground and then was silent.

#

"It went really bad, didn't it?"

Cara was half asleep in her and she rolled over and tried to shake herself awake.

"What?"

"Shh," someone else said.

Cara slid out of bed and dropped to the floor and went to Nena's rack and tapped her arm.

"Christ," Nena said. "I didn't even hear you. What?"

"Get up."

Nena stayed motionless for a moment longer and then rose up and rolled out from under the thin blanket. Cara led her by the arm until they had cleared the door and they went into the common area which was occupied only by two off-duty officers trying their luck at cards.

They sat in the corner furthest from the officers and Nena opened her mouth to speak and then closed it and started crying. She had bit down on her tongue to stop from being too loud but there were still small noises of breath and a couple times a raw noise that resonated at the back of her throat. Cara had her hand up as if to reach out for her but set it back on her knee.

"It just got really fucked up," Nena said, after a long time had passed.

Cara nodded and said nothing. Nena wiped away tears and yawned and then groaned. "I'm going to regret not getting enough sleep tomorrow," she said.

Cara still said nothing and Nena finally looked at her.

"Why did you even bring me out here?" she said.

"You seemed like you needed to get something out."

"I guess I just needed to cry. It was so fucking—I mean, that black hole thing, Jesus, I keep hearing the sound she made. I didn't even know you could do that. I don't know how they can do that. I mean I know how you could do it, with biotics, I guess, but I don't know how anyone can actually do that to someone. I guess I don't know how I can shoot people either."

"They were trying to kill us."

"All of that training and just—is that just what happens, you do what you can and then you get shot anyway? I thought all the shields and armor were supposed to at least give you a chance to—Jesus, can you still hear it? That singularity thing? It just won't stop, it's like that shitty music they play in the lifts that I can't stop hearing for hours after I get out. And then I was watching the sarge when he was talking to you and his whole face just--and you don't even notice, do you?"

Cara took a long time to answer and when she did she spoke very quietly. "I grew up with this," she said.

"You were in that gang, right?"

"Yeah."

"I guess you know by now that most people don't see anyone die until they're a lot older. Sometimes they don't ever see it."

"I know."

"But you don't believe it."

"I don't want to think about it too much."

"That's probably smart."

They stopped talking for a while and listened to the shuffle of cards across the table at the other end of the room. Another two off-duty Marines came in and joined the game and soon there was a companionable clamor among them and goodnatured cursing and Nena smiled.

"Want to go join them?" Cara said.

"No. But I like listening."

#

The next weeks brought more raids. The Verge had a great many asteroids and most above a kilometer or so in length had been made habitable. Those who hid there were not friends of the law.

Most engagements after the first were begun and ended with overwhelming force and many surrendered before a shot had even been fired. But others were the same exercises in room clearing and Cara went along for one more and then for two. After her fourth outing there was a trip to the medbay for shrapnel and bullet wounds and then on the fifth a set of three broken ribs from a shotgun blast that the shields and armor had only barely held.

She was awarded a medal and a promotion to Sergeant. She took the chevron-marked shoulderplates from the Major and said Thank you and the Major said Keep it up.

#

The next raid was a rock named X77/O9-V and what the designation stood for none could surmise. But it was a three-kilometer slab of ferrous metals studded with hangars and comm arrays and even a network of antique slugthrower autoturrets which engaged the _Tripoli_ at range. The ship's GARDIAN system burned them out within a few minutes and then three shuttles were launched, and Cara went on the second with a squad of six that she had picked herself, Linda and Nena and her other friends among the grunts, volunteers all. Linda and others with assault rifles, Nena and Rob with shotguns and Rob with biotics besides.

They landed in the hangar to complete silence and a perimeter set by first squad, and took positions behind the shuttle and scanned the interior.

"Orders, sarge?" Nena said half mockingly, and Cara smiled.

"We wait for the LT," she said.

And the lieutenant gave the order to move out, after a brief wait, and they made their way through the blandly familiar tunnels at good speed, wondering why the rock was empty.

Cara was in the rear and when the proximity mine blew. The bodies of first squad saved her. She was thrown back almost into the hangar bay by the shockwave and her rifle was torn wholly out of her grip. Then there was a huge rippling crack and a vibration in the floor and she registered a howling so loud that her helmet dampened it. Then there was nothing.

The a-grav decking had been powered down and the lights had died. She floated up in a black silence that was absolute save for the stars visible through the hangar bay and the noise of her breathing.

"Report," someone said into the comm, and she sounded off and heard the ragged voices of several others. Six of third squad and all of second. Nena's voice came through calm and unhurried and Rob's and Linda's as well. Of first squad there was no one.

"Lieutenant?" Cara said questioningly, but there was no response. She keyed her omnitool to fix on the navtag of her suit and found the LT floating with a meterlong gash in her breastplate, visor frozen with condensation.

"We need to get back to the ship," someone said, and Cara's HUD tagged him as D. Perez, Corporal.

"Who's the ranking officer?" she said.

There was a silence that went on a moment too long.

"Okay," she said. "Everyone get their boots on the floor and let's get back to the shuttles."

They pushed off the surfaces they could reach and regrouped on the floor. Many had lost their weapons and when Cara went for her pistol she found that the mag clamps had been shorn away, and the pistol with them. She retrieved the LT's rifle instead and checked the safety and switched it to semiautomatic.

They swept the hangar bay and trotted out together into the open. Of the three squads and twenty-one people who had come there were eleven left and she could see their crosshairs overlaid before her like ghosts in her HUD. Nena followed behind her with a heavy tread and shotgun in hand.

They made it to the hangar undisturbed but the shuttles had been blown by secondary charges, the fires extinguished in the vacuum. They scanned the insides and the pilots were dead. Someone murmured one of their names and Perez set a hand on the back of one of their chairs.

"We have to find another shuttle bay," Cara said.

"What if there aren't any?" someone said.

"There are. And if there's anyone else still on this rock they need a way to get off it."

"Can't we signal the _Tripoli?"_ Nena said.

"Our comms don't have the range. So we can sit here and run down what air we've got left or find another shuttle."

"I'm with you," Nena said, and Rob and Linda followed suit and eventually so did the rest. They left the shuttles behind them and went back into the tunnels, Cara leading the way.

They met no resistance and indeed no living soul for the first many minutes. though they cleared and searched every room. There was a makeshift barracks in one of the larger rooms and the footlockers were ajar and the beds unmade as if recently vacated, every item hanging strangely in the air. There was a weapons rack close to the doors which held a few remaining pistols and Cara took one and slotted it onto her armor and the others who had lost theirs followed suit.

They made their way down a strange descending corridor which was made of crudely altered prefab units and which led in a spiral to the very core of the rock. No doors or any markings but those of the panel numbers and after many levels of walking they came to a heavy airtight door. Cara stood by the access panel and linked to it with her omnitool and the crude encryption gave way and the door opened. Another door of the same make lay on the other side. The a-grav decking was active in the interior and they felt weight return to their bones.

"Airlock," Rob said.

"Yeah."

"You figure they're on the other side?"

Cara looked around. There was some small space for cover on each side of the door and little more.

"Stack on next to the doors and let's get it open," she said. "But weapons up."

Even the sergeant of the other squad obeyed her and she closed the outer door and pressurized the interior. One of the others took off her helmet and set it on the floor and then hefted her rifle again. Another did the same.

"Far into the corners as you can get," Cara said, and keyed the inner door.

It had not even gotten halfway before the gunfire started. Nena was hit high on the thigh and went down and Rob threw up a barrier.

"Hit them back!" Cara called, and they opened up, firing indiscriminately around the corner of the door, at what exactly they could not see.

A grenade soared into the barrier and then another. When they blew Rob stumbled but held it and Cara could see his teeth working even through the faceplate of his helmet.

"Got it?" she said, and he nodded.

Another grenade came in close to the edge and nearly made it past and the shrapnel took a Marine from third squad in the leg and she screamed and pitched forward and was shot.

"Seal it!" someone yelled, but Cara was firing with the rest, and when another grenade blew and Rob dropped the barrier she was hit in the gut by a rifle shot and pressed herself back into the corner again. Nena was slumped there too and breathing heavily. They exchanged a long look and they touched their helmets together. Then Cara brought up her omnitool and keyed the outer door.

The wind dragged her out. She slammed her against the far wall and scrambled to the side as the others hit after her. She looked for Nena but a batarian came flying out without a suit and struck the wall at a bad angle that twisted his arm under his back and broke it. He was clutching at his throat and then three more followed after him at a slower speed all trying desperately to breathe. Cara stood unsteadily in the dying gale and null gravity and shot them all, the bullets silent in the dead vacuum, and when she was sure that they were dead she dragged the armored bodies of her squadmates back inside the airlock and sealed the door.

 


	5. Torfan

"How are you feeling?" The doctor said.

Cara kept her eyes closed against the pain in her head and spoke through a dry and ragged throat.

"How are the others?"

"We'll talk about that later. Right now I need to know how you're feeling."

"Nena?"

And Nena moved into view from where she had been standing at the side of the bed, and in relief Cara let go of her hold on consciousness and slipped again into sleep.

#

Six of them had made it.

Rob and Linda were both dead, and one of the others as well. Cara sat stonefaced while Nena told her. Death by exposure to vacuum.

"So I killed them," she said, her voice still brittle and quiet.

And then there were the dozens of others who had died when she had opened the airlock, batarians, asari, turians, humans, a coalition of those outside the law who had made one last good stand and all died together, struggling for breath in the sudden silence. Forty-seven. Most with rifles or other weapons, but some who had died unarmed and scratching at the walls, typing messages on their omnitools.

Cara bore this news too with no expression, repeating _all things die_ to herself like a litany.

"I can't do it any more," Nena said. "I can't go out there."

"We have to."

"You think they're going to send us out again?"

Cara laughed and through her wounded throat it was an ugly sound. "At least we know what we're doing," she said. "No one else seems to."

Nena shut her eyes and smiled and it was as if someone had taken a piece of wire and dragged back the corner of her mouth.

"They're all dead," she said.

"People die."

"But it's not just—we all woke up together this morning, Rob wanted to get back quickly so he could catch a game of cards with someone before the late shift. Hannah was worried the LT was going to NJP her for nonreg hair length. Fucking hair. Now she's dead. She didn't even die doing anything that mattered, and they're going to do it again, aren't they? Make us go out there?"

"Of course they are."

"They can't fucking—they all died, they have to see how stupid it is, it's not even getting us anywhere! What, we're going to clear out every rock in the Verge just because they hit one colony?"

Cara didn't answer and didn't need to. Nena shook her head until it had become a nearly compulsive motion and only when she started to actively rock on her chair did Cara raise a hand and reach out for her. In her head there was another poem by Tennyson which repeated itself, some small recognition of the dead: _Flow down, cold rivulet, to the sea, / Thy tribute wave deliver: / No more by thee my steps shall be, / For ever and ever._

#

The captain held off from further raids for several weeks.

Other ships of the Alliance had made it insystem and they conducted their own raids, venturing further out into territory of questionable sovereignty until they were in batarian space entirely. There were more asteroids to be scoured and information to be gathered and increasingly there was talk of a moon called Torfan, a barren icy rock several times as big as any they had raided and some kind of stronghold for the ones responsible for the Blitz.

Intel was gathered and analyzed and a clearer picture of the leadership emerged. There was talk of the planner of the Blitz and his top lieutenants and more talk that no further raids were forthcoming, and indeed that any pirate activity or expansion had been stopped in its entirety.

But the Alliance had lost citizens, and the parliament at Arcturus still clamored for blood. They sent more cruisers with frigate escorts and then the dreadnought _Tai Shan_ , and on one of the patrols Cara glimpsed it from a viewport, a three-quarter-kilometer colossus, ventral cannon wide enough to fit a shuttle down the bore.

#

She turned 23 on a patrol run, and the date passed unmarked and unrecognized. Three days later Nena murmured _Happy birthday_ in passing but there were no friends other who remembered. Her omnitool sent her an automated message as well which she deleted without opening.

Eventually the _Tripoli_ 's turn came again and there were more raids. More troops had been transferred over from the _Tai Shan_ and Cara went with a squad which was wholly green and led them well. Nena who was now a sergeant led another. But the asteroids were small and none important and even the mere showing of the _Tripoli_ was enough to force surrender. Cara corralled the ones that gave themselves up and shot the ones that did not and after two more raids there were none left that resisted.

#

She spent most of her off hours reading.

She read the long classics of war, and the poets too, scrolling for hours on her omnitool until the overtaxed emitter failed and she replaced it with another. Among the works she read she preferred the ones written by the veterans themselves, small details of real life littered through abundant fictions. When she had worked through the books on the omnitool itself she moved to accounts on the extranet, everything from Marine logs of the Rainforest Wars to the scanned images of handwritten texts that did not far exceed the age of the written word. And when she had read her fill of these there were still the works of a dozen species which remained, asari and turian and krogan, though these last were muddied enough by boasting and exaggeration that she neglected them entirely.

She still stood watch and took any posting assigned, whether outside the XO's door or the entryway to the CIC. Always attentive to those that passed, to the actions of those she saw at their work. In the CIC itself the captain passed her by with purposeful ignorance that bordered on fear and when she could hear his orders she remembered what Nena had said of his incompetence, his blindness to the needs and dispositions of the crew.

#

She spent slow evenings with her new squad and learned their histories and proficiencies. There was a slightly older boy whose last name was Ortiz who was at the start of his second term of service, who had grown up and trained in the colonies, hunting the strange wildlife of Eden Prime with an antique rifle of old Earth make. Then a girl her age named Shaw, who had a fluid aptitude with biotics that she used to accomplish such mundane tasks as lifting a drink to her mouth. There was Beletski, who had lost parents in a batarian raid, and Hewitt, who had lived on the Citadel, and who frequently told stories of the wards, the views, the politics. And then Sheng, who despite her eventempered nature was a mean fighter in hand to hand and who had beaten all of them separately in impromptu sparring matches, pinning them to the deck or choking them out entirely.

They were an oddly matched group and wary of each other but nonetheless made an effort to find some common ground. They were all of them terrible at cards and instead played endless rounds of sim games on the lounge terminals, standing breathless behind the two combatants and roaring at every victory, consoling the defeated. Cara tried her hand against each of them in turn and lost repeatedly and was mocked goodnaturedly by all.

"I thought you were supposed to be good at everything," Beletski said.

"Not games," she said.

But there was space between her and the rest of them and on raids all semblance of friendship and camaraderie faded. She commanded them through the hivelike tunnels of another asteroid and they cleared rooms as a matter of routine and took prisoners and data and equipment and came back to the shuttles in the space of an hour.

"Like clockwork," Beletski said, and Ortiz looked at him.

"Have you ever actually seen a clockwork clock?"

"Well no," Beletski said, and the whole squad broke down into improbable laughter. The prisoners who were cuffed and crowded into the back of the shuttle shifted uneasily.

#

She was in the mess eating when Nena sat across from her with a tray.

"Heard you pulled more raids?" she said, without preamble.

"Yeah."

"Go okay?"

"We're all still alive."

Nena grunted and ate. One of the members of her squad sat down next to her but she leaned over and said something in a low voice and he went away.

"They haven't put me on any other assignments yet," she said. "They seem to give you everything."

"Who's your LT?"

"Fuller. Knows what he's doing, at least from the way he talks about it, but he hasn't gotten in combat yet. Hopefully he won't get any of us killed when he does. Who's yours?"

"O'Brien."

"How's he?"

Cara thought for a moment. "Loud," she said eventually. "He yells everything, even over the comm."

"That's it?"

"He's okay. I think he knows what he's doing, but we haven't really needed him. Most of the time I'm already doing what he orders us to do."

"Like rounding up all those surrenders."

Cara conceded the point with a nod and continued to eat. Nena had laid down her fork and toyed idly with the handle of her knife, thin stamped steel.

"I've been missing Linda," she said. "I didn't know enough about her. Rob too. All of them. I feel like I was just getting to start to know them and then they were just... gone."

"What about your new squad?"

"They're good. Green, but good. I keep comparing them, though."

"To the others?"

"Yeah."

"You shouldn't do that."

"It's not like I'm trying to. It's just there. You're telling me you don't do it?"

"I think of them sometimes, but it's not the same thing."

Nena opened her mouth and one corner of her lip raised in nearly a sneer. "You never really get to be friends with anyone," she said. "Do you?"

Cara had a dozen answers that she had used before but the truth was something that she could not put words to. In the end she said nothing.

Nena waited expectantly but after a long enough silence she rose up and went elsewhere.

A few minutes later Ortiz sat beside her.

"Problems, sarge?" he said.

"No."

#

The news about Torfan broke through Major Kyle just after her change of shift. In their company's barracks he stood at the front of the room and directed them all to sit and laid out what was to come.

The Alliance had known for the better part of a year that the moon Torfan was the nerve center of a wideranging operation that spanned the Verge from end to end, home to God knew how many criminals and other outlaws. But though the raids on asteroids had been one thing Torfan was a moon fifteen kilometers in diameter and had been built up over dozens of years, sporting fortifications and turrets and shielding, and in orbit around it a small swarm of retrofitted ships for further defense.

The plan was to launch an overwhelming assault meant to force surrender. The _Tripoli_ would be deployed as one of many escorts for the _Tai Shan_ , flying in formation with frigates _Trafalgar_ and _Leipzig_.

Cara expected Kyle to tell them that they were to do nothing more than buckle down for the duration but the longer he talked the more it seemed as if he was leading up to something that he feared reaction from.

Eventually someone spoke up. "Are we going in?" they said.

The Major shifted and crossed his arms. "The captain volunteered the _Tripoli_ 's entire company," he said. "We're going to be the first in."

#

It was a week until the op and the whole complement of Marines on the ship seemed to sink together into a black mood that there was no rousing them from. They cursed the captain in private and the operation itself in public and the entirety of Torfan wherever they went, and the mess was rife with strategies and dire predictions both. Cara talked with her squad about the challenges she thought they would face and the loadouts they would take and when she had the time she visited the ship's armorer and talked her into a custom rifle.

The end product was a weapon similar to the one she had carried in her first raid, an updated Avenger with a cut down barrel and a shortrange scope, the stock adjusted precisely to her length of pull such that when she put it to her shoulder and settled her cheek the trigger came perfectly to hand and the scope came perfectly to eye. It was chambered for shredder rounds and she slotted in a fresh ammo block, checked the heatsinks, and pulled it to her chest, finger resting light on the trigger guard.

"You like it?" the armorer said.

"Have to shoot it to find out."

#

She found Nena the day before the op, after the _Tripoli_ had already taken its escort position in the fleet. She was in the lounge watching the interceptors on point defense, and Cara sat down next to her. Nena turned her head to regard her and then looked back at the viewport.

They sat together a long time.

More interceptors came past and some other Marines came into the lounge and played a round on the simulator and left. An officer came in to survey the room and saw them but passed on with no comment.

Nena was sat with her hands folded in her lap but nonetheless was very tense. Cara noticed it but did not comment.

"We're probably going to die, aren't we?" Nena said eventually.

"They might surrender."

"I don't think that's going to happen."

"Wouldn't you surrender if a dreadnought was about to blow your entire moon out of orbit?"

"I would if I thought they would actually pull the trigger. And what's in it for them if they surrender? If they give up they spend the rest of their lives in prison, most of them. They fight, maybe they win."

"They don't have the numbers to win."

"Well maybe they figure that the Alliance doesn't want to throw away hundreds of people to take one rock. I don't know. I don't think they're going to surrender, or if they do, it's going to be a trap once we land. It's not like Shanxi, there's no code, they're not going to play by the rules now if—"

Cara reached over and took her arm and squeezed it.

"We'll be okay," she said.

Nena looked at her. "You have no idea if that's true or not."

"We've gotten this far."

Nena took a long and shuddering breath and then leaned over onto Cara's shoulder. A sudden and comforting weight and one wholly unfamiliar.

Cara stayed still so as not to disturb her and heard her breathing steady and deepen. Eventually she leaned over as well and despite the strain in her neck and the odd newness of the position she felt herself relax.

#

The night before the op she dreamed of a forest of burned and stunted trees, embers floating through a haze of smoke. Voices calling out to her. The tones were in some way familiar but she could not place them, and then Nena came into a clearing, grinning in her way, flames licking up her legs, around her chest, her hair gone up like a torch. Cara ran as if to reach her but she was slow, and Nena walked past her, and when she turned around there was the open airlock door, wind roaring in the gap—

#

She woke to light and the LT's yell.

For once she did not drop immediately to the floor. Something of the dream was still in her head and she closed her eyes and considered it until the LT passed her rack and banged on it and moved on.

#

They listened from their seats in the shuttle to the wideband broadcast from the _Tai Shan_. It was an impressive speech from the admiral aboard and the Major explained that it had been written by a hostage negotiator at Arcturus, the last best hope for forcing a surrender.

At the end of the speech there was an ultimatum, and the ultimatum gave them an hour. Some of the others in the shuttle prayed. Cara put her hands together, the way the nuns had taught her long ago, but she thought of nothing.

The hour passed.

The Major browsed through the gravimetric scan data and updated them on likely layouts, turret emplacements, known troop data. But the scan only reached so far into the rock, and the rest was wholly unknown. Eventually even he was quiet and browsed the incoming data in silence.

At the end of the hour the comm speaker came to life.

_"All ships, this is Admiral Merrin. They have rejected our offer. Stand by for combat."_

#

The a-grav decking had been switched off for combat, and they hung weightless in their armor watching each other until the lights were turned off as well. Through their helmets they could hear the faint hum of the shuttle's drive core, and above and beyond it the slow whining strain of the _Tripoli_ 's. A few loud creaks from the superstructure, the distant hollow boom of the main gun. There was the louder sound of an impact, and the vibration of it echoed through the deck and through the shuttle. The breach alarm sounded in the hangar overlaid with the cool female voice of the ship's VI.

_Hull breach along starboard side, deck three. All personnel fit EVA suits immediately._

"What the hell gets through a shield?" Ortiz muttered in the dark.

Once her eyes had adjusted she could see the full array of interfaces in the cockpit, the pilot's hands moving over them. The brightness had been dimmed to the absolute minimum, and she was just starting to make out some of the more obvious controls when a red light blinked on. The pilot touched the side of his helmet.

"Five minutes," he said, and then cut out.

Someone muttered what might have been a prayer. What seemed a moment later the light went amber and the pilot called _Two minutes._

"Hold onto your straps," the Major said, and Cara looped her hands around the webbing and heard the others do the same. Outside the shuttle doors there was the hiss of depressurization, and then silence.

"One minute," the pilot said, and through the forward viewscreen she could see the hangar bay doors slide open. Then the amber light blinked to green and they launched, a brief hover above the deck and then forward, out among the bright cold stars.

#

There was still incoming fire, but the surface of Torfan was cratered and glowing and most of the turrets had been destroyed. They were still several kilometers distant and fighters dove on strafing runs leaving drivetrails in their wake, GARDIAN fire blinking in and out of existence from the _Tripoli_ or some other ship.

When they were nearly to the surface a round from the _Tai Shan_ struck with enough force to blow out a crater the size of a city block. Chips of rock pinged off the shields and the hull beneath it, but they dove into the hangar and the Major yelled "Let's go!" and they piled out.

There were turrets along the right side wall already stitching holes into the shuttles, and Cara nearly took a shot at it but Nena beat her to it with a grenade. She and her squad camped out behind the cover of the shuttle with its shields still up until Nena came over the comm.

"They're shooting from two separate hallways, just need to lay down some suppressing fire and we can push—anyone copy that?"

"Copy," Cara said. She switched to squad comms. "There's two hallways we need to suppress. Shaw, you good to get them off their feet?"

"Good for one hall, anyway."

"Sergeant," the Major said, and she could hear the hesitation in his voice. "What are you doing?"

"We're going to lay down some suppressing fire on the hallways so we can push up."

He nodded jerkily and waved for her to move, and they moved out.

Beletski and Hewitt started shooting immediately, and Shaw waited until she was in range and drew up a wave of blue energy that rippled through the decking and into the hall. Everyone affected flailed for balance until they were shot and then dropped bonelessly to the deck.

Fire from the other hall had faltered. Cara sighted in on it and shot two in a clean rightward sweep and Nena's squad brought down the last shooter with another grenade.

"Clear," she said, a moment later.

The Major ran up behind them, gesturing to the second hall. "Platoon," he said, "secure the hangar and then we can move out through there. We need one squad to stay back and cover our retreat."

"A full squad?" Cara said.

"Yes, Sergeant, a full squad."

She looked over to Nena and tilted her head almost imperceptibly in the direction of the shuttles and Nena nodded back. "Second squad can take guard duty, Major," she said.

"Good. All other squads accounted for?"

There were some affirmations but all too few. Cara looked back and realized that only five shuttles had made the bay. The other five lost somewhere on approach, LT O'Brien gone with them.

The Major stuttered something and some fine traces of blue energy swirled around his fingertips as he flexed his hand. He had his finger on the comm and all the squads could hear his mouth opening and closing. After a moment Cara reached forward and took his arm away.

"Sir, we have to move now."

"The other shuttles—"

"They're all dead. We have to move right now, sir."

"Yes. Alright. Second squad takes—what squads are left?"

"First, second, fourth, fifth, and ninth. You told us that we were going to rendezvous with second platoon further down."

"Alright. Get off the comm."

He turned around to face the squads that remained. "Second squad stays," he said. "The rest will push on down the second hall and rendezvous with second platoon. I'll stay here and follow you on the tacmap."

Cara looked to Nena again and this time it was Nena that shook her head.

"Understood, sir," Cara said, and the other sergeants murmured the same.

#

They set out with first squad in the lead, and Cara brought up their rear with her rifle. The hallway was not prefab but bare carved stone and it turned sharply right and down. Ortiz looked around the corner and called _Clear_.

There was gunfire up ahead, and voices over the proximity comm. Cara braced on the wall and watched the rest of the squad move forward, and when someone rounded the corner she waited only long enough for them to raise their shotgun and then pulled the trigger.

In the confined space the boom of the rifle was immense and the figure dropped straight down and folded at the waist before swinging backwards to the floor. His shotgun clattered down in front of him. Ortiz halted and looked back and waved a thank you but Cara was still on scope and when an arm presented itself around the corner with a grenade she steadied her aim and took a shot but missed. The squad was already running backward and someone was yelling _Get down!_ and when the grenade blew the concussion flickered off their shields but all had cleared the blast radius.

"All okay?" she said, and they said that they were.

She resighted on the corner. When someone else leaned out into view she shot them neatly through the forehead and they too went down.

Stack up, she said, and they did.

She moved down the wall until she was nearly in view of the other side and then said _Go._

Shaw was in the lead with a shotgun, and when she moved Cara did as well. Shaw shot the first enemy point blank and pushed forward, and Ortiz followed behind, shooting over her shoulder. There was a whole crowd in the short hall and Cara took shots at what she could hit, and when Shaw took a knee and lifted the whole crowd into the air she shot three in quick succession and before her rifle overheated. She slapped the heatsink and cursed but Ortiz was still firing and Hewitt and Beletski had rounded the corner and were shooting as well, and by the time fourth squad reached the corner all of the enemy combatants were dead.

They policed the bodies and collected weapons. Cara covered the other end of the hall. There was still the noise of gunfire and the voices on the proximity comms were louder.

"That's got to be second platoon," Ortiz said.

"I thought they'd be further away," Cara said.

"The hangar bays are probably all connected. That first hall where we came in probably leads down into the main areas, living quarters, the places where everyone's holed up. Wouldn't you figure?"

"I guess we'll see."

They pushed further down the hall and stacked up at the corner. Cara leaned around to get a quick view and then pulled back.

It took another look to confirm but there was another clutch of enemies ahead. She called for grenades and tossed two, then there was a three count and they blew. Two bodies landed heavily in view. One was an asari, the other a human, and neither was wearing armor.

The asari was still alive. She looked up at them and some traces of blue appeared around her fingers, but Ortiz shot her twice in the chest and she was still.

Cara looked around the corner again. There was one enemy turian left alive crawling toward the other end of the hall dragging two shattered legs behind her. One was connected only by a thin splinter of plating and she was keening something high and untranslatable that might not have been a word at all. The Marines at the other end of the hall had stepped out and Cara waited for them to shoot but they did not.

"Friendlies!" she radioed down, and waved a hand beyond the corner. "First platoon!"

"Second platoon here! I think you got all of them."

"That turian got any weapons?"

There was a clatter of a pistol being tossed and then a single gunshot. "Yeah she did," the voice said.

"Who is that?"

"Lieutenant Fields. Who are you?"

"Sergeant Shepard. Are we good to come out?"

"Yeah."

They came around the corner into the hall, and the aftermath of the grenades greeted them. Ortiz unsealed his helmet and retched onto a clear spot of floor and a few of the others followed suit.

"Make sure you get those helmets back on," Cara said, and then stepped forward among the bodies to Lieutenant Fields.

"I think I've seen you around the ship," he said, and held out a hand.

"Likewise."

They shook hands and then he gestured to the hall behind him. "We just pushed down from our landing zone, we have a squad covering our exit. We thought we were heading down toward the center of this rock."

"Us too, sir."

"Did the Major land with you?"

"Yes sir. He's back in the hangar with our second squad, following us on the tacmap."

"You lose anyone?"

"Five shuttles before we even made the hangar, sir."

"Yeah, we lost three. Plus two more Marines in the goddamn clusterfuck after we landed—"

He switched comms and spoke for a moment and then switched back. "We're working on keeping a third with us, but she's not doing well," he said. "Can you raise the Major?"

She called back. "Major, this is Sergeant Shepard. We've made the rendezvous with second platoon and Lieutenant Fields, the hall led to their hangar. They had a second hall as well. We need to push to the center."

 _"Understood_ , _"_ the Major said. _"Tell Lieutenant Fields to take second platoon back and push forward into the second hall, and go with them. I'll keep in contact."_

"Yes sir."

She switched comms again and looked at Fields. "He says push down," she said. "We're going to follow you into the second hall."

"Keeping himself in the rear?"

"Yeah."

"Well that's not news. Alright, let's hit it then."

#

They fell back to the second hangar and took up positions at the entrance to the second hall and cleared it and pushed on. LT Fields led with second platoon's third squad and they made it nearly half a klick down a bare and featureless tunnel before hitting the first open space.

It was or had once been a mess hall and bodies were scattered about it in all attitudes of death. A section of tables had been blown apart by some concussive force and a single blue hand rested serenely in a corona of scorch. Where the body had gone there was no telling. There was movement at one end of the room but it was only a salarian in civilian clothes. He walked a few steps in one direction muttering slowly to himself and then walked back. One of his eyes had been shot out. After three repetitions of this pattern Fields called out to him but there was no response.

There was a gunshot from one of the serving windows and the squads took to whatever cover they could find and laid into the serving window together until the metal shutter had been shot to pieces. When the fire cease the salarian was somehow still standing. One of the other squad's scouts scanned the corners and called _Clear._

"You see any exits, Shepard?" Fields said.

"Yes sir, three. Left, right, and one by the serving windows."

"We'll take the right side tunnel, you take left."

"Yes sir."

They moved in squads and carefully. The salarian had not changed his strange patrol even with the noise of gunfire, and as Cara passed him by she thought she heard him say her name but knew it could not be so.

As fourth squad passed she heard the noise of an impact, and when she looked back someone had clubbed the salarian over the head with the butt of their pistol. He lay on the floor with his arm thrown out to the side, his eyes shut. He was still breathing. She paused to see who had done it but no one spoke up, and she had no power over them anyway.

They pushed on. The next room they came upon was a server array shielded behind glass, and she set a navtag on her omnitool but did nothing else. Then there was another half a klick of hallway which curved in a jagged descending spiral, and the noise of gunfire echoed off the walls ahead. She switched to proximity comms and listened but there were no Alliance voices that she recognized. There were the thumps of explosives and a short burst of screaming over the comm and then nothing.

"Sarge?" Min said.

"What?"

"You don't think we should wait for backup?"

"We've got half a platoon, we are the backup. Let's see what's down there."

"Yes ma'am."

They descended the last few steps to the bottom of the tunnel, and when they looked out around the corner there was a much larger room which expanded a full two stories above their heads, lit only by occasional tracer rounds and helmet lights of a line of Marines pressing from the other end of the floor. The combatants facing them were many in number but retreating and most weaponless, but Cara saw one of them fire onto the Marines and gestured in their direction and said _Shoot them._

They needed no second invitation. First squad opened up and fourth came up behind them, and by the time ninth had made it down to the landing there was a mess of bodies slumped at one exit to the room.

"Should we toss a grenade?" someone asked, and Cara shook her head.

"Any friendlies out there?" someone said on the proximity comm, and Cara put her hand up to her transmitter.

"This is Sergeant Shepard, first squad, first platoon _Tripoli_ ground forces company. Who is this?"

"Lieutenant Wilder, first platoon _Trafalgar_ rifle company. You're good to come out, I think that's all of them."

"Yes sir."

They stepped out from cover into the open space. Spread out against the far wall was Wilder's company, arrayed in squads with their rifles up and scanning. Wilder himself raised a hand in greeting.

"What hangar did you land in, Sergeant?" he said.

"I don't know. Wherever we were meant to land. What's this room?"

"Staging area of some kind, is what we were thinking. There's a lot of equipment off to the left but they killed the lights—Fisher!" he called. "Get that pile of equipment lit up!"

"You want me to shoot it, sir?"

"No, just put your helmet lights on it."

A group of the Marines turned and their lights played over a stack of hardcases of every color and shape and behind them the outline of some large vehicle under a plastic tarp.

"We think they were trying to get to their equipment and we cut them off, but we don't know," Fisher said. "Where's your LT?"

"Dead, sir. Major Kyle's our CO for this op. He's back in the hangar."

"Can you raise him?"

Cara tried but there was only dead air. "No sir," she said.

"There are some branch tunnels from here that we could use help clearing. We still don't have any idea how far this all goes, _Trafalgar_ 's second platoon is covering another tunnel... hell, I don't even know what direction it's in. We're just going to dump troops into the tunnels until we get every bastard that's down here."

"Yes sir."

"If you can peel off a couple squads to take that first tunnel and a couple for the second, we can split for the rest."

"Yes sir."

"Good hunting."

#

She tasked fifth and ninth squads to the second tunnel and took hers and fourth for the first. They peeled back the tarp from the vehicle in the equipment pile as they passed and it was an M44 Hammerhead, beat to hell from God knew what assignments and one of its thrust nacelles was crimped and blackened and useless. She wondered for a moment if it could be made useful or not, but dismissed it and led on.

The tunnel was smaller than the others before it and shorter as well. They pushed through into a makeshift armory and there was a turian lying dead with a pair of ragged holes in the top of his skull. The flesh bulging oddly, the back blown out entirely. The screen behind him was cratered with a third bullet and the weapons cages were still locked.

"Looks like someone already hit here," Hewitt said, and Cara nodded agreement.

They moved on down a connecting hall and passed a squad from the _Leipzig_. They were down to five and one was limping and another carried a dented chestplate from a hammerhead round and held a pistol in her left hand with evident difficulty. After a brief acknowledgement of each others' presence they passed on.

The rooms they found were not arranged in any sensible order and some were no more than arches in the rock that led to spaces scarcely taller than the tops of their helmets. Most were hardly filled at all and if they were then with junk and useless spare pieces of archaic tech which had sat there unused for years. There were no enemies.

They pushed on further and found a set of offices with terminals and Cara cracked them and downloaded their contents and the others searched drawers and found holdout weapons and some sheets of paper with random lines in pen, an oldfashioned glass hypodermic and a bag of some grainy red substance, a set of badly composed holos of a colony planet. There was a gunshot outside and then swearing and Cara came out to check but it was friendly fire, the bulk taken by the shields and the last of it by the edge of an arm plate. A girl from fourth squad was apologizing profusely to Hewitt but he waved it off and they went on.

They kept their suits sealed but the air seemed to get colder as they went deeper. There were no lights. Eventually they encountered enemies again. Some were running toward them and they did not ask if they would surrender. The first was a turian and the next another salarian who Ortiz shot three times, twice in the chest and once in the head, and it died with its last exclamation exploding out the the back of its throat.

They halted and Cara scanned ahead but there was only the darkness and the cooling bodies. Distantly they heard more gunfire but it came from behind them.

'Where are we even going?" someone from fourth squad said, and Cara shrugged and said _Forward._

They pushed on. Past doors locked with bolt locks rather than electronics, more scattered bodies, the wide red painted slash of a turian clan insignia. Past smaller branch tunnels with crudely carved signage, all of it in darkness. The air was very still. Cara herself did not know where they were going but it was her squad and another against the unknown and that was enough.

After a long walk they came to a stairwell and they descended it slowly and cleared every landing, checking for doors or traps, trying to breathe silently to hear any footsteps of an enemy. They reached the bottom after three switchbacks and turned into the hall.

There was a man standing guard outside a door and he was watching the stairwell. As soon as they came into view he opened up. The first burst glanced off Ortiz's shields and the second hit Hewitt square in the chest and he stumbled and fell back into the stairwell landing. Cara shot the man twice but he held his finger on the trigger and the assault rifle fired until it overheated. Rounds sparked on the walls and one ricocheted from wall to stairway to one of the members of fourth squad but so slowly that the shield stopped it dead and the slug fell to the floor.

Hewitt was struggling up scrabbling at his armor.

"Did it get through?" Cara said.

"Phasic," he said, and he ran his fingers over the twin dents in the armor, about a foot apart. "Got through the shield, armor held it."

"Good. You and Beletski, move it up."

"Copy."

They moved and stacked up by the door. Hewitt asked if they should use a stun grenade but Cara said no. They opened the door and went in one at a time and Hewitt radioed back a moment later.

"It's kids," he said.

"What?"

"Kids. Thirty, maybe forty."

She stepped out from where she was braced on the corner of the stairwell and the rest of the squad covered her as she walked to the room.

And there indeed were children. Closer to forty in number, of every age from babies in the arms of the older ones to some on the cusp of adulthood, looking up at them from the darkness with only omnitools for light.

"Jesus," Sheng said. "Who are they all?"

No one spoke directly to them though there was a low murmur of frightened conversation.

"Identify yourselves," Cara said suddenly, and pulled her rifle back across her chest from where it had been pointing into the room.

One of the older children put her hands in the air and stood. She was a turian lanky with new growth, her plates still raw and growing, and Hewitt turned his shotgun toward her almost immediately.

"They told all the younger ones to stay in here," the girl said, and her voice faltered partway through. One of her mandibles twitched uncertainly and there was a broad brushed slash across it in red paint.

"Are any of you armed?" Cara said.

"No."

"You live here? On Torfan?"

"Yes."

"Jesus," Sheng said again. "They have their families here."

"Where are your families?" Cara said.

"I don't think I'm supposed to tell you that."

"Answer her, kid," Beletski said, but Cara waved him down.

"The sooner you answer the sooner all of this will be over," she said. "Where is everyone?"

"They didn't really tell us. They all went everywhere, they put us down here so that nothing would—"

"Shut up," one of the other children said, "they're just going to shoot us anyway."

"We're not going to shoot you."

"Got company," Ortiz said from the stairwell, and Cara turned toward the door. While she was looking away the other child who had spoken rose and made a grab for a pistol under her shirt, but the frontsight snagged on her clothing and she stood squarely in Hewitt's sights, her hand still on the grip. Hewitt shook his head very slightly side to side and did not speak. Then Cara turned around and the girl tried to draw and Hewitt shot her.

The children screamed as the body fell and someone else drew a pistol and let off a round. Cara and Hewitt and Ortiz retreated together out the door and put their backs to it. Almost immediately there was gunfire from the end of the hall and they dropped prone and Cara fired at the first shape caught in her helmet lights and then the next, kept firing until they were gone.

"Fuck," Hewitt was saying, "fuck, fuck, fuck."

"She was going to shoot you, you did good."

He looked at her sidelong from where he lay and she looked back but could not hold his gaze.

Somewhere down the hall someone was noisily dying and the voices of the children screaming were still loud inside her head. Then she realized that they had never stopped. She could still hear them even through the door.

She got to her feet and Hewitt did as well. Only when she nudged Beletski with a boot did she realize that a phasic round had made it through his shield. When she rolled him over the hole under his eye was oddly neat and he was grimacing with his eyes closed but was otherwise undisturbed.

"Beletski's down," she radioed out.

"Fuck," Ortiz said.

The rest of second squad and fourth moved up. None were sure what to do with the body. In the end they set a navtag and left him and posted Hewitt at the door to stand guard over the children. Diminished by two, they passed on into the next tunnels.

#

They walked into a thick and claustrophobic blackness where they could pass only two abreast and only after a long time did it flare and widen again. No sooner had they emerged than a sniper's bullet cut down Ortiz and she looked for cover but there was none.

"Shaw, barrier!" she called.

Shaw put it up and another shot hammered into it. Cara tossed a grenade around the side and when it blew the light of the explosion lit up a knot of enemies crouched behind a low ridge of stone. One of fourth squad's medics stooped to see to Ortiz. Cara threw a second grenade and blew it above the ridge and the shrapnel whined off the stone. A few fragments were caught by the barrier and dropped straight down to the floor.

Ortiz was breathing heavily and the fourth squad medic was packing medigel into the wound in his cheek but the bullet had gone out the back of his head and his eyes did not look right. Shaw started to turn to look but Cara stepped in front of her.

"Just keep the barrier up," she said, and Shaw nodded.

They stayed in that small place for a long stretch. Cara tried to call back to Hewitt or Major Kyle or even Lieutenant Wilder or Fields but there was no signal. As she looked up at the stone carved out so many years ago the enormity of it suddenly weighed on her.

"I'm calling it," the medic said.

Shaw turned her head again and Cara stepped forward and shook her head. "Keep that barrier up," she said again.

"Gabe—"

"He's dead."

Shaw drew a shaky breath and the barrier rippled but remained. "Bye Gabe," she said, and took a couple more loud breaths before stabilizing the barrier.

Cara reached up as if to rest her hand on Shaw's shoulder but dropped it and turned back.

Fourth squad was looking at her strangely and she looked flatly back at them.

"We're going to keep moving," she said.

The Sergeant on the other squad was named Halsey and she was the first to speak up.

"Are we even going to accomplish anything by pushing on?"

"You heard what Wilder said, they're just going to dump Marines down these tunnels until we get everything that's here. We've been doing a good job so far, I don't see why we should stop now."

"Because I don't want to die, and I don't want my squad to die either."

"Stay behind cover and keep your shields boosted. Or just stay behind us. We're going to move up."

"You can't just tell all of us to rush in because you feel like it, that's the Major's call."

Cara reached down and set a navtag on her omnitool for Ortiz and then looked back up. "No I can't," she said. "If you want to go back, you can go."

"We're not going to go on with just the three of us, are we sarge?" Shaw said.

"No, we'd go back. Three of us isn't enough."

"We could call Hewitt up," Sheng said.

Halsey let out a sharp breath and nearly laughed. "You're actually serious about going on? After losing them?"

"It's what we do," Cara said.

They looked at each other. Then Halsey looked back at her squad. One of them had lent a hand to reinforce Shaw's barrier and widened it to the full width of the tunnel. The others gave no sign of any reaction.

"Okay," she said. "We'll bring up your rear."

"Thank you."

#

Shaw took down the barrier and they stepped together over the bodies of the ones the grenade had killed. This time Cara took point, pistol up, tucked in close to her body. The hall narrowed further and they passed through it singlefile and emerged in a wider space.

It was a room of holding cells but the cells were only holes in the walls with barred doors rusted with age, the inhabitants all shot and recently. One was still breathing in a mechanical way though the bulk of his skull had been blown out. They shot the locks open and checked them all but fourth squad's medic could do nothing.

The next tunnels led up. They were wider and the lights were on and Cara switched off her helmet lights and the others did the same. She put her pistol back in its slot and drew her rifle over her shoulder again and no sooner had she done so than a batarian came into view ahead.

"Barrier!" she called, and tried to get off a shot but the safety was on. By the time she had fumbled it off the barrier was up and the batarian had been joined by three others who fired with their rifles until they overheated. Fourth squad's biotic had joined the barrier again but he and Shaw were gritting their teeth.

"Not going to be able to hold it forever," Shaw said.

"How long?"

"Two minutes. Less if they keep firing."

And they kept firing. Cara directed Halsey to set her squad along the walls and braced her own rifle and aimed.

"On my go, drop the barrier," she said. "And when that happens, open up."

Shaw acknowledged and Halsey as well and so did Sheng. She waited until their weapons had overheated again and then said _Go._

The barrier went down. They all fired together as if on a range and all three batarians dropped, small shields overloading and sparking and failing, and the collective thunder of gunfire was enough for the auditory pickups in their helmet to overload as well. Once the fire had stopped they rebooted and Cara said _Move up._

They moved up. Cara kept her aim on the edge of the tunnel, but when she made it far enough to look over there were no enemies that she could see.

It was another set of holding cells and these were more modern than the last. The inhabitants were still alive and came up to the barriers yelling. Cara looked over to Halsey.

"Your squad should get them out," she said. "We can cover."

"Copy that," Halsey said, sounding pleased.

They shot out the lock panels and killed the fields and some of the prisoners rushed weeping out into the open and fell at fourth squad's feet or simply walked blinking into the main expanse of floor. Others did not move from where they lay. The medic checked them and pronounced some dead and others merely asleep or unconscious and they gathered the rest into the middle of the floor.

"Anyone know anything about the layout of this place?" Cara said.

One of the batarians raised their hand and Cara gestured for him to stand. She did not know batarian biology very well but he seemed younger and his coloring more pale. The creaselines across his skull were very deep.

"They brought me in through one of the hangars," he said. "That tunnel."

He gestured to the other tunnel in room and Cara looked at it and then back to him. "What was along the way?"

"I don't know. It was a long walk, and they had me blindfolded."

The medic was calling for support in one of the cells and when he came out he was leading someone unsteadily toward the rest of the group. A girl. Young, darkhaired, eyes a brown deep enough that the pupils were lost. She was dressed in bland colony clothes marked with dirt and other things. She did not seem to see anything as she walked and when the medic rested her down among the others they seemed to move away slightly to regard her.

"Who is she," Cara said.

No one answered for a moment and she repeated the question into the silence though she had already guessed part of the answer.

"They took her from a colony," a man said, and Cara realized then that they were all males save for the girl.

"What did they do to her."

No one answered and no one would.

Cara kneeled down in front of the girl and put her rifle aside and looked into the girl's eyes. No flicker of recognition or response and she knew the look for what it was. She took off her helmet and looked again.

"I don't know if you can hear me," she said. "But I will kill them."

She spoke in a voice that was low and throaty and raw and the rest of the group shifted away still more. Halsey cleared her throat.

"We should get them out," she said. "Get them to safety."

"We don't even know the way back yet," Cara said, and put her helmet back on. "If we try to get them out behind us, they're still in danger until we get more support. We need to post guards and rendezvous with more Marines, then come back for them."

"And leave them here?"

"There are two tunnels. We cleared one, we're going to clear the other, and it leads up. Sooner or later we'll get to the hangar and we can call more support. But if we run into resistance along the way, they're going to be in danger."

Halsey let her arms sag and her rifle swing and shook her head. "Fine," she said. "Keyes, you're on guard duty. Everyone else, let's go."

#

They pushed up the tunnel. It did indeed slope slowly upward and all of them felt that they were finally going back the way they had come. They encountered no one for a long while and the walls were bare of doors or any markings whatsoever though some of the lights had been broken.

Eventually the tunnel leveled out and they stared down a long open stretch where a knot of figures was gathered nearly at the end. Cara motioned everyone back from view and they set up with their rifles on the edge of the rise in the ground and sighted in.

They were mostly batarians, all of them in armor. One had tech armor activated and the orange plating glowed a few inches out from his hardplates and shimmered as he moved. One of the others said something and all of them laughed and the sound echoed faintly down the hall. Cara counted slowly and looked back to Halsey.

"I count twenty," she said. "Armor, shields, one with tech armor, some kind of leader."

"Aronov, get up there," Halsey said, and fourth squad's longrifleman shuffled up and settled down beside Cara.

"What range you got?" he said.

"One-fifty. Don't you have a finder in your scope?"

"It's fucked, emitter lens is shot. One-fifty, though?"

"Yeah."

He dialed it in and settled onto his scope and she saw him mouthing a count of the figures ahead. "I get twenty too," he said. "You think you can take out the tech armor guy?"

"I can probably get his shields. What ammo are you loaded for?"

"Tungsten."

"I've got shredder. You shoot first. As soon as I hear you fire, I'll fire, and that should get through."

"Okay."

"Halsey," she said, "you good if I give the go order?"

"Fine by me."

"Okay," Cara said, and switched comms so everyone could hear her. "Me and Aronov are going to shoot first," she said. "As soon as you hear a shot, open up. Pick targets according to your positions, shoot for center of mass, don't miss. Shoot until they're all dropped."

"Copy that," Shaw said.

Cara sighted in and listened to Aronov's breathing. "Ready when you are," she said.

He fired.

The shot splintered the batarian's tech armor and took him in the chest. and he staggered back, arms wide. The others had already opened up but she waited for her shot until the batarian had steadied himself and then fired herself. His knee blew out backward and he dropped forward and down.

The others continued firing but she held her finger over the trigger and watched. The one she had shot did not rise.

Eventually the gunfire died and she rose up. "Wait here and cover me," she said, and jogged down the tunnel despite the protests over the comm, holstering her rifle on the way.

The leader was the only one left alive. He was crawling toward the other end of the tunnel and toward one of the pistols dropped by the others, and she stamped hard on the bleeding remnant of his leg and then kicked him over onto his back. He looked up at her through the helmet and she reached down and triggered the emergency release and nudged it off with a boot. Then she took off her own and clipped it at her side and drew her pistol.

"The girl," she said.

He had his head back and was breathing heavily. She nudged him with her boot once and then again, harder.

"The girl," she said, a second time.

"What—girl?"

"The girl in the cells."

He looked up at her with two of his eyes, the others closed. She was standing above him with her pistol loosely aimed and her look was blank and terrible and he did not even hesitate before telling her.

She had been a girl on Elysium and they had taken her as a trophy or prize once they realized the battle was lost, back into the shuttles and back to the asteroids and then back to Torfan. They had passed her around. Two years. Some refraining but most not, and she had become a kind of reward to those who were in favor—

He offered explanations and excuses and finally pleas and surrender and she raised her pistol up over her head and caved in the crest of his skull.

She stood over him watching the blood flow into the cracks in the bone. The last rise and fall of his chest. Then she turned back to the others. Some of them had started to walk toward her and Halsey was foremost among them, running. She had pulled off her helmet and she was yelling something but Cara could not hear it at first, whatever it was.

"You killed a fucking prisoner," she was yelling, and Cara regarded her and then put her helmet back on and the comm chatter of the others greeted her.She switched over to private with Halsey alone.

"What the fuck, Shepard?" she said again.

"He'd lost too much blood, he was going to die anyway."

"So you fucking bash his head in? You realize I got that all on helmet recorders, right?"

"Halsey," she said. "He told me what they did to the girl."

"What girl?"

She gestured back in the direction of the cells. Halsey's expression faded from fury to a tight calm. "Oh," she said.

"And he said that there were others, too. A lot of others."

She could hear Halsey draw a breath through her nose and then let it out through her mouth.

"We still have to do things by the book," she said. "They're going to hear all of this when they review the logs."

"So we wait until the end of the op and shoot the helmet cameras, then wipe the backups. Say incoming fire got the cameras and something fried the drives, maybe a phasic round that hit just right."

"Both of us?"

"Stranger things have happened."

They stood looking at each other for a long moment. Then Cara's comm pinged an alert from another member of her squad. She switched to open comms and Shaw's voice cut in.

"Orders?" she said.

"We keep moving. Same plan as before, get back to one of the hangars, get backup, get the prisoners."

"Yes ma'am," she said, and Sheng echoed it.

#

They pushed up still further and there were doors in the tunnel again, offshoot rooms most of which were empty. Cara cleared them with her squad as the others watched the tunnel. Even as the third one in the stack she landed shots on several who she encountered and it was just another repetition of the killhouse drill from training, sectors cleared and called and the dead dutifully reported as they killed them. One room held a crowd of four and instead of shooting Shaw slammed them bodily into the wall hard enough that their heads cracked and then let them fall to the floor. Cara shot a fifth in a corner and they exited the room and moved on.

After ten rooms Halsey's sqaud took over. They cleared the first two with no gunfire and on the third there was a long sustained firing and they came out with a casualty. He had taken three rounds in the chest one of which had made it through the chestplate and the medic stayed back to stabilize him.

The fourth and fifth rooms were empty and on the sixth the whole room blew out in a cloud of shrapnel and flame and Halsey who had been last in the stack and had not rounded the corner sat blinking in the smoking aftermath, thrown onto the floor by the blast. She spoke something indistinct and slurred and slumped forward until her head touched the floor. Cara knelt next to her and triggered the emergency release on her helmet and there was blood running out her ears from the blastwave and she was dead. Cara picked up her helmet and shot off the camera and wiped the backup remotely with her omnitool. Then she set a navtag and they moved on again.

The lights were starting to stutter and there were the echoes of other explosions through the rock. "I don't think we should keep clearing rooms, sarge," Sheng said, and Cara agreed.

They walked a long curve that led upward and all but stumbled upon a dead squad of Marines from another ship. Piled together opposite an open door as if they had been thrown. The wall behind them was scarred and cratered with the impacts of bullets, hundreds of heavy rounds, and the armor of the bodies was holed through and leaking a strange pink mixture of blood and medigel. Some shield emitters vainly sparking as if they might still make some difference. They checked for survivors but found none and Shaw traded her shotgun for one of their rifles. Then Cara set another navtag and they moved on yet again.

There were other Marines dead in the tunnels and in a short stretch the lights were out entirely. Cara swore she could see a shape move at the edge of the shadows but by the time she brought the area into scope there was nothing. Shaw had taken off her helmet and was panting heavily from the long jog and with this as constant background they continued on.

Eventually they heard the sound of gunfire up ahead. One long burst and then a few moments of silence and then a burst again. It was another curved stretch ahead and they could not see the source of it.

"Sounds like ours," Sheng said.

They advanced until Cara could put her scope on what was ahead but it was a single dead Marine with her finger locked on the trigger of her rifle, and it would fire until it overheated and pause and fire again. The barrel was red and the floor worn entirely away in front of the muzzle and there was no telling what had killed the woman or how long she had been dead. Cara shot the rifle at the heatsink to disable it and scanned the area ahead and Shaw who was prone at her feet looked out as well.

"I got nothing, sarge," she said.

"Looks clear to me too."

"Do you figure those guys we shot earlier were the ones who did this?"

"Maybe."

"If they weren't, I wouldn't want to run into the ones who did," Sheng said.

They made their way past the body, wary of the few doors. Cara traded with Shaw for the point position and when Shaw stopped in front of her they nearly collided.

"What?" Cara said.

"I think I see something moving."

Barrier, Cara said, and Shaw let her rifle drop onto its sling and put her hands out and a moment before her barrier went up a round caught her in the chest.

She stumbled back into Cara but the barrier was up.

"Fuck," she said breathlessly, and the barrier wavered.

Cara squeezed her shoulder. "You good?"

"Yeah. Shield got it."

Whoever was at the other end of the hall was firing faster and the rounds skipped off the barrier and the walls and the floor.

"How long can you hold it?" Cara said.

"Minute, maybe."

Cara slipped the sling of Shaw's rifle over her head and took it in hand and gave it to Sheng. "On three," she said, "lean around that side of the barrier and suppress. I'll try to get eyes on."

"Copy that," Sheng said.

She counted it out and on three Sheng held down the trigger and the incoming fire stopped. Cara sighted in. The nearest corner was a hundred meters out or more and she saw the shape of what might have been a rifle left on the floor but there was no movement.

"Cease fire," she said, and Sheng stopped.

There was a long and echoing silence. Shaw was muttering something to herself and had leaned forward to actually touch the barrier with both palms and her eyes were closed. Cara kept watching the corner and the moment a figure presented itself she fired and the shape dropped to the floor.

"Got one hit," she said. "You can drop the barrier."

She dropped it and overbalanced but recovered. Sheng gave her her rifle back and took up her own shotgun but Cara did not move.

"Just give it a moment," she said. "Get down on the floor. Shaw, get your helmet back on."

The figure at the corner was moving slightly though she was not close enough to see any detail. She shot again and Shaw flinched next to her and the figure moved back with the force of the shot. Then it was raised up and thrown across the hall as if in a rage and a much larger shape came into view, a thin X of glowing circles across its helmet, tall enough at the ridge of its armor that it nearly crested the ceiling of the tunnel.

"No goddamn way," Shaw said, and then it charged.

Cara put two rounds into the krogan's helmet before reaching for her grenades only to find she had none left. "Grenades!" she called, and Shaw and Sheng both threw them but the krogan had already cleared the better part of the distance and when the grenades blew it shrugged off the blast and kept running. Cara put a third round into its helmet and then a fourth and when the rifle overheated she drew her pistol and managed two more shots before it lowered its shoulder and hit her.

It planted its feet and rounded on the others as she was still in the air. She hit the floor five meters away with four ribs and her chestplate broken, shield emitters failing. Her pistol skittering away. She drew a breath. Her chest felt wrong and she could feel part of it press outward against her cracked armor.

She looked forward. The krogan had picked up either Shaw or Sheng and was holding them aloft with a hand about their neck. As she watched it slammed them into the wall and she fell back and raised her arm and keyed up her omnitool. Something had been bent in her fall and the emitter was skewed but she linked in remotely to Shaw's armor and found the power settings and after locking out the safeties she dumped the remaining energy in the power cells into the forward shields.

The emitters in Shaw's armor glowed and blew out. The wavefront of energy melted the front of Shaw's armor and overloaded the krogan's shields and sheared off its arm at the wrist. It stepped back. Someone was screaming and the krogan was roaring in pain or fury or both and Cara rolled onto her chest and wheezed and curled her head down. The medigel was working but there was still pain and her vision was narrowing. Her pistol lay a few feet out of reach. She crawled to it and took it up and rolled onto her back. The krogan was still roaring and she sighted in as best she could and fired.

The shot clipped the side of its helmet and ricocheted into the tunnel and she fired again to the same effect. It turned on her and paused. She put a third shot into its helmet and then shifted her aim lower and shot at the gap in the armor above its knees. It staggered but started to walk toward her and she fired until she had overheated the pistol and the krogan's left knee was blown out in shreds of metal and bone. It went down. Teetering unsteadily on its good knee, the bleeding from its sheared off wrist already stanched.

It dragged itself toward her with a hand, a meter at a time. Her pistol was still throwing off steam and she waved it through the air as if to cool it faster. She could hear the krogan breathing in a way that shuddered in her chest and every time its hand landed on the ground and its knee scraped forward she could feel it in the floor. Five meters. At the close distance the sheer bulk of it all but blocked out her view of the hall and its wrist was larger around than her thigh.

Human, it said, its voice huge and old and deep, and then the pistol pinged readiness and she raised it in both hands and shot the krogan three times through its eyepiece and it fell dead across her legs.

She lay back.

Her ribs were still broken under her armor, and her chest fell far further than it should have when she breathed. She pulled her legs free from the krogan's head and braced on the muzzle of the pistol and rose to her feet, bent over, coughing and sucking air, coughing until she curled an arm lightly around her chest and walked on.

Shaw was dead. Sheng had been lying at the base of the wall when her shields had blown. She lay with her helmet and the plating of her left arm melted but she was holding her pistol and she was still alive.

"You got it," she said, but her helmet's speakers were fried and the words were muted. Cara nodded and gestured and Sheng pulled her helmet off with her good hand.

"A fucking krogan," Sheng said.

"Yeah."

"You think there's more?"

"I don't know. If there are, I can try to do what I did with Shaw."

"That was you? Her shields?"

Cara didn't speak but only nodded and Shaw slowly shook her head.

"That's fucked up," she said.

Cara didn't answer.

"That's fucked up," Sheng said again. "I thought it was just that it crushed the power cell or something—you fucking killed her?"

"If I hadn't done anything we'd all be dead. Now get up, I don't know how much longer I can keep moving."

#

Her rifle had been bent at the barrel by the krogan's foot and she retrieved Shaw's shotgun instead and limped forward. Sheng took point.

When they reached the corner they saw that the sniper who had engaged them from the corner was an asari, young, perhaps a hundred, perhaps two. Her head had been snapped backward by the two rounds that had made contact and she lay where the krogan had thrown her, next to the wall. Her rifle was still at the corner and Cara's gaze lingered on it but she went on.

The tunnel sloped sharply up and there was a brief scattering of voices on the proximity comm, broken up by static. Cara switched to the command frequency and through the static she could hear a voice she thought she had heard before.

"Little further," she said, leaning forward at the waist.

Sheng had pulled ahead and as they came to the crest of the tunnel the comm cleared and it was the voice of Lieutenant Wilder from _Trafalgar_ 's first platoon, barking orders about directions of fire and barriers and _Danson, get your fucking head straight and start shooting,_ and as Cara came over the top she realized that the helmet's audio pickups were dead entirely and all she could hear was the faint and muffled sound of gunfire through the metal and acrylic and the voices of the others on the comm.

"Lieutenant," she said weakly.

"Identify yourself, Wilder said. Who is this?"

"Sergeant Shepard, first squad, first platoon _Tripoli_ ground forces company—"

"Good to get you back, we could use your squad—"

"They're all dead sir, I'm hit, we've got prisoners behind us that need recovery, and other Alliance casualties—"

There was a huge echoing boom and Wilder's voice cut off for a moment and then came back. "What tunnel you at, Sergeant?"

"I'll set a navtag, sir, and my helmet's on strobe."

She set the tag and the strobe and leaned down heavily onto her shotgun, safety on, muzzle against the ground.

Sheng covered her from the front, watching for movement, and after a few minutes she raised her rifle at a figure at the edge of another tunnel but it was a Marine. Her HUD tagged him as D. Ruiz, Corporal. She switched to proximity comms.

"You from Wilder's company?" she said.

"Yeah, he sent me over to look for you. You said you got prisoners?"

"Down that way," she said, and gestured behind her. "Plus casualties—five KIA, one wounded. Some of the prisoners too."

"You too?"

"Yeah. Ribs, maybe some other things."

"Okay. LT," he said over the comm, "this is Ruiz, I got Shepard here at the tunnel, 'bout fifty meters off your position, down that side way. She says five KIA, one WIA, plus prisoners." He clicked off the command comm. "How many prisoners?" he said to her.

"Maybe a dozen."

He clicked on the comm again. "A dozen prisoners," he finished.

There was another long pause and then Wilder's voice came over again. "Bring them up, Corporal," he said. "Get them back to the shuttles."

"Yes sir," he said. And then to Cara: "Okay, follow me."

#

They went up the steep ramp of a smaller tunnel and into a wider space that was a junction of many tunnels where Wilder's squads were laying down suppressing fire. Ruiz turned as she made her way back and fired with them and Shaw turned back and fired as well.

She made her way past the Marines and up another tunnel with Ruiz holding her arm. There were lights ahead and open space but her breathing was coming shallow and her vision had started to fade. The medigel had dulled the pain but she didn't have enough air—

She unsealed her helmet and let it drop to the floor. Ruiz looked at her. "You okay?" he said.

She tried to speak but there was a sharp pain that had started low in her chest and she could not breathe. She reached up to her throat, circled the front of it with her fingers.

"Choking?" Ruiz said, and she shook her head, still trying to breathe, her grip going slack on the shotgun as she fell—

**Author's Note:**

> This work updates by one chapter every two weeks, on Fridays.
> 
> The title, of course, is from Tennyson's _Ulysses_.
> 
> If you enjoyed this work, or have any feedback, please leave a comment!


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